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Subject: "The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"     Previous Topic | Next Topic
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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-19-14, 02:53 PM (EDT)
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"The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
 
   Someone's asked about this before, and I'm still not going to pin myself down by naming them individually, but it just occurred to me out of the blue that the UF-universe IPO would not use the slightly wacky name its Giant Robo predecessor had for its top-tier Experts of Justice, the ones who are essentially counterparts to Big Fire's Magnificent Ten. For one thing, "the Nine Great Kings of Heaven" doesn't translate into idiomatic Standard very well (as you can see there); for another, it's not wacky in the right way.

UF's IPO does have such a grouping, albeit one constituted very much with tongue in cheek. It consists of the Chief and his senior Deputy Chiefs as well as a scattering of hand-picked top operatives from SA1 and SA11; at least one of its number is not actually an IPO officer at all, but rather a Grey Lensman with very close personal ties to the Chief and his family. Officially, they exist as a group only in rumor and conjecture, as part of a carefully orchetrated whispering campaign intended to unsettle - and also mock - the Magnificent Ten by implying that the IPO aspires to something like their own level of pretention. But there aren't nine of them and they aren't kings of anything...

... they're called the Majestic Twelve.

--G.
can't believe I didn't think of this years ago, actually.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten [View All] Gryphonadmin Jan-19-14 TOP
  RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Nathan Jan-19-14 1
  RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten VoidRandom Jan-19-14 2
     RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Gryphonadmin Jan-19-14 4
  RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Offsides Jan-19-14 3
  RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Mercutio Jan-19-14 5
     RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Nova Floresca Jan-20-14 6
         RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Mercutio Jan-20-14 8
             RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten The Traitor Jan-20-14 9
     RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Matrix Dragon Jan-20-14 7
     RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten CdrMike Jan-20-14 10
         RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Mercutio Jan-20-14 13
             RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten CdrMike Jan-21-14 14
                 RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Mercutio Jan-21-14 15
                     RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Gryphonadmin Jan-21-14 16
                         RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten CdrMike Jan-21-14 18
                             RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Gryphonadmin Jan-21-14 20
                     RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten CdrMike Jan-21-14 17
                         RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Gryphonadmin Jan-21-14 19
                             RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Mercutio Jan-23-14 21
     RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten Offsides Jan-20-14 11
         RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten mdg1 Jan-20-14 12

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Nathan
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Jan-19-14, 03:47 PM (EDT)
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1. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #0
 
   ...Well played, sir.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."


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VoidRandom
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Jan-19-14, 04:37 PM (EDT)
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2. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #0
 
   >UF's IPO does have such a grouping, albeit one constituted very
>much with tongue in cheek

MJ12 encrypted watermark on the business cards then? You know that the M10 would notice and would assume some kind of subtle plot. Never would expect that all that's there is the agent's usual In n' Out order. (Or maybe an entry from the 1950 NY phone book)

--John

"They copied all they could follow, but they couldn't copy my mind,
And I left 'em sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."


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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-19-14, 06:25 PM (EDT)
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4. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #2
 
   >>UF's IPO does have such a grouping, albeit one constituted very
>>much with tongue in cheek
>
>MJ12 encrypted watermark on the business cards then? You know that the
>M10 would notice and would assume some kind of subtle plot.

Yeah, they've never twigged to the fact that TOP SECRET/MAJIC is a classification that means "make sure Big Fire's intel division sees this". :)

--G.
"Disinformation Bureau, how may I confound you?"
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Offsides
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Jan-19-14, 06:15 PM (EDT)
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3. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #0
 
   Brilliant!

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>


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Mercutio
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Jan-19-14, 08:14 PM (EDT)
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5. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #0
 
   I confess to being surprised that Majestic 12 didn't already exist as a dark science organization dedicated to stealing or reverse engineering Zetan Overtechnology (and later on, Tesla technology) for their own purposes.

That said, the name is, of course, perfect.

Although I would argue that the Lensmen, while not as pretentious as their Big Fire counterparts, are still pretty pretentious. They wear giant fancy gems that telepathically broadcast "I AM A BIG DAMN HERO" to anyone they flash them at, I mean, that is not exactly something a modest organization comes up with. :)

-Merc
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Nova Floresca
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Jan-20-14, 01:22 AM (EDT)
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6. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #5
 
   The stylings of Lord Immartelio notwithstanding, I wouldn't call the Lens pretentious, considering the, as the English say, "thickness" of the average civilian.

On a side note, I keep having this horrified suspicion that sooner or later Big Fire is going to recruit or engineer a high-end telepath and fake the Lens effect for a terror op . . .

(This, btw, is a side-effect of watching Puella Magi Madoka Magica all the way through and reading the side mangas: you'll come to hope to see the worst thing you can imagine happen in any given situation, because the writers are good at imagining much *worse*.)

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."


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Mercutio
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Jan-20-14, 05:47 AM (EDT)
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8. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #6
 
   >On a side note, I keep having this horrified suspicion that sooner or
>later Big Fire is going to recruit or engineer a high-end telepath and
>fake the Lens effect for a terror op . . .

Y'know, this seems like it would be a great idea if the IPO were run by anyone other than Gryphon, who one imagines has just an absolute ton of credibility when it comes to saying things like "an evil doppelganger did it."

For myself, because I subscribe to the "Big Fire is an infernal front" theory, I've long thought that the logical move of on their part is to get a cosmic hacker of some sort to compromise the lens network. Skuld is really good at what she does, and the lens network may, as she's said, be totally unhackable; but lots of people have thought their security was absolute or that their codes couldn't be broken. Not a lot of them have been right, and demons are... tricksy.

-Merc
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The Traitor
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Jan-20-14, 06:07 AM (EDT)
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9. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #8
 
   Me, I'd just buy a house down the street and start hammering together a nuclear bomb out of smoke detector parts in the basement. It happened in real life, it can happen in UF. Admittedly, the kid in question was trying to build a nuclear reactor, but w/e, my point still stands.

The resident's association might have something to say about it, though...

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.


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Matrix Dragon
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7. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #5
 
   >They wear giant fancy gems that telepathically broadcast
>"I AM A BIG DAMN HERO" to anyone they flash them at, I mean, that is
>not exactly something a modest organization comes up with. :)

I see it more a polite 'This individual is a duly appointed officer of the International Police Organisation.'

Matrix Dragon, J. Random Nutter


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CdrMike
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Jan-20-14, 07:41 AM (EDT)
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10. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #5
 
   >I confess to being surprised that Majestic 12 didn't already exist as
>a dark science organization dedicated to stealing or reverse
>engineering Zetan Overtechnology (and later on, Tesla technology) for
>their own purposes.

No, that's XCOM, but they operate with about the same level of secrecy, mostly because if it ever got out what their chief scientist qualifies as "interrogation," Earth would have long ago been cited for multiple violations of intergalactic POW laws.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

"You know, the world could always use more heroes." - Tracer, Overwatch


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Mercutio
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13. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #10
 
   >No, that's XCOM, but they operate with about the same level of
>secrecy, mostly because if it ever got out what their chief scientist
>qualifies as "interrogation," Earth would have long ago been cited for
>multiple violations of intergalactic POW laws.

In my headcanon, until proven otherwise by our hosts, X-COM in the UF universe looks something like this:

(As always, I am not Ben Hutchins, and these are merely the imaginings of a reader.)

* * *

The Extraterrestrial Combat Unit (X-COM)

Formed in SY 1948 as as a response to the Reticulan incident at Roswell the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit, usually abbreviated as X-COM or XCOM, was formed by the UN to study alien technologies and develop defense strategies against possible invasion. As there were very few extraterrestrial incursions over the next half-century, the organization languished in obscurity, avoiding disbandment or being folded into UNIT due to the periodic technological breakthroughs that emerged from its labs.

Priorities changed in SY 1992, after the flashy and destructive clash between the nascent WDF and GENOM Corporation over Neo-Worcester. One of the many panicked responses to that event was a sudden and massive influx of money, resources, and respect to the then-tiny X-COM, which had been waiting for its day in the sun for over forty years and quickly established a reputation amongst those in the know as Earth's premiere force of extraterrestrial hunter-killers and developers of weaponry that derived from nonhuman technological paradigms. Much good was done by them; Earth in the nebulous decade prior to formal first contact was the focus of much criminal extraterrestrial activity. However, much evil was done as well; the Vulcan Science Academy holds X-COM responsible for the disappearance of one of their survey vessels in SY 1998, the Incom Corporation claims that X-COM's Interceptor and Firestorm aerospace combat platforms were developed using information "obtained" from a SubPro liaison who vanished from his hotel room in 1995, and significant evidence exists that the organization attempted to mount an invasion of Mars well before the SY 2002 Colonization War, destroying the ancient Sarmak temple complex at Cydonia Mensae for reasons unknown.

X-COM itself splintered during the First Contact Wars, with the bulk of the organization siding with the holdout nations of the Anti-Alien Alliance. Brigadier General J.A Lethbridge-Stewart, leader of the "loyalist" X-COM faction, re-formed the rump of it into a division of UNIT in 2005; however, it was largely held together by his personal charisma and authority, and the tendency towards human supremacy remained strong in the rank and file. Following the Brigadier's death in 2057, X-COM was disbanded altogether, although rogue elements within it, sponsored by the industrialist Jack Harper, would abscond with much of their proprietary alien-killing technology and go on to form the human-supremacist terrorist group known as Cerberus.

The second iteration of the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit was re-chartered by the Olympus superstate in the 2300s as a bulwark against the ongoing interference of extrasolar powers (primarily GENOM, but also including the CFMF and others) in Earth affairs. This organization was much leaner and more focused than its predecessor, and never controlled the globe-spanning resources thereof; in fact, it rarely fielded more than a single strike team. It did, however, have significant engineering and scientific expertise; noted polymath and X-COM Head of Engineering Doctor Charles Shen was responsible for a number of remarkable advances in plasma bottling, and his Skyranger dropship design is very nearly comparable in performance to a Pelican for half the up-front cost.

The modern version of X-COM came fully into its own following the War of Corporate Occupation, during which Colonel David Bradford led the STRIKE-1 team against no less than twenty separate GENOM command and control nodes, often penetrating deep into enemy-held territory to do so. Operation RELENTLESS CONSULTANT (known officially as the Twelfth Battle of New Orleans and locally as the 12th Ward Uprising; see related Galactipedia entries) is the best-known of their still mostly classified missions. Shot down over eastern Texas en route to the insertion point, Colonel Bradford commandeered local transportation, led his team through back-country Louisiana, and rendezvoused with local partisans on-schedule and with their mission payload intact. Under cover of civil disturbance, STRIKE-1 infiltrated and destroyed the grounded Acclamator-class assault ship serving as GENOM's regional command hub, disabling aerospace C&C over the entire Imperial Americana. The team then deployed an experimental portable capital-class deflector shield generator in the city center, preventing GENOM from responding with an orbital bombardment in reprisal, as their tactical doctrine indicated in such situations. STRIKE-1 held the line against repeated MILARM orbital drop pod assaults for 48 hours until they could be relieved by the Olympus naval task force sent from Cuba to liberate and secure the city.

Folded into EarthForce following the formation of the Earth Alliance, David Bradford was made X-COM C-in-C. Commander Bradford re-organized and expanded the organization, which now had an interstellar as opposed to merely planetary ambit.

Unfortunately for X-COM, it was not immune to the political deterioration that would set into the EA during the 2390s and 2400s. Never regarded as politically reliable by EarthDome, too much of a patriot to resign, and too visible and renowned a war hero to dismiss, Commander Bradford was forced into a series of increasingly untenable choices. X-COM itself was saddled with a number of political appointees, including their Head of Research, Doctor Moira Valen, referred to by Charles Shen as the "craziest woman to pick up a vivisecting knife since K'athrynn Halsey."

The comparison to the Salusian war criminal was to prove apt; much like Halsey, Valen produced solid results in the field of genetically-enhanced soldiering and was not overly concerned with medical ethics in doing so. Provided by EarthDome with nearly limitless amount of the experimental bio-mimetic gel known as MELD (precise chemical composition and source still unknown) Valen produced a long line of super-soldiers. Primarily focused on quantity over quality (although both Charles Shen and Commander Bradford maintain that had she been given the budget, Valen could have produced Magnificent Ten equivalents; the thought kept them up many a night) X-COM's genetically and cybernetically enhanced strike troopers would prove to be one of the most cost-effective force multipliers in Known Space. This did not go unnoticed by X-COM's political masters; by 2408, Valen's influence within the organization was so strong and her position so untouchable she was known to go over Commander Bradford's head to make direct contact with strike teams in the field, directing them to recover or preserve this or that piece of rare technology or particularly useful-looking corpse, regardless of prior mission directives.

The missions themselves were of an increasingly uncomfortable nature to the dwindling number of X-COM veterans among the command staff and the unmodified troopers in the rank-and-file; where before they were tasked with destroying genuine extraterrestrial threats to human life, increasingly X-COM strike teams were being deployed for targeted assassinations, snatch-and-grab jobs, dubious black ops in the space of fellow Federation members, and on one very memorable occasion for riot suppression on Proxima Centauri.

Ironically, it was the sidelining of Commander Bradford and the remaining old guard that would prove to be the undoing of EarthDome's new and improved X-COM. With so many mission directives coming from outside of standard channels, Commander Bradford was free to focus X-COM's intelligence assets on genuine threats as opposed to political targets of opportunity. Big Fire, the Church of Man, the Sword of Salusia, the Ktulhu, among others, were no more beloved by the Clark and Greeley administrations than they were by other galactic polities, and when not needed to act as a cudgel the Dome was more than happy to let Commander Bradford do his job as he saw fit.

What happened next remains classified at the highest levels, but the broad details are known; sometimes in late 2411, Commander Bradford uncovered evidence that what he had previously thought to be malicious and cynical xenophobic propaganda was indeed true; the Earth Alliance, and by proxy the Federation, had indeed been compromised at the highest levels by extraterrestrial forces hostile to its existence.

Bradford acted decisively, as he was known for. He passed his intelligence through a back-channel to the Salusians, and from there it made its way to the 3WA and the IPO, where it reinvigorated their long-stalled investigation into the explosion of the USS Danzig. He then quietly began preparing X-COM for the worst.

When the worst came, in the form of the Federation Civil War of 2412, much of X-COM simply vanished. Ordered to execute pre-invasion strikes on New Avalon and Jyurai to decapitate vital strategic targets prior to the arrival of the Federation task forces sent to subdue those polities, only a single X-COM strike team arrived at the pick-up point. It was subsequently discovered that Commander Bradford and Doctor Shen, in conjunction with X-COM's entire engineering staff and a little over a third of its combat strength, had pulled the trigger on a long-planned mutiny. Doctor Valen and her research team survived, barricaded in their offices, at the cost of the lives of another third of X-COM's combat strength, but the armory was emptied, the generators and other vital base infrastructure destroyed, and the hangers bare; Bradford had disappeared.

He hadn't gone far. As X-COM C-in-C, Commander Bradford has been one of the only people on Earth to both know about and care about Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart's centuries-old collection of files. Contained in those files had been a complete accounting of every weapon, craft, and building that the first iteration of X-COM had ever commissioned... including the location of their secondary research base, buried under the ice pack on Ellesmere Island. It was cold, isolated, completely inadequate to the logistical needs of a modern military organization, laughably designed and laid out... but it was undetectable from orbit, still had a working runway, and the thermal borehole that powered the base hadn't collapsed yet. Once there, they linked up with other partisans, most notably the Canadian Resistance, and got to work. X-COM engineering expertise and the location of the base itself were particularly useful to the outlaw aerospace firm Avro Canada, and five of the famous 48 Avro Arrows that reclaimed the skies over Canada on the Day of Reckoning based out of the Ellesmere base and proudly wear X-COM livery alongside their RCAF insignia to this day.

Bradford would remark that the work done by X-COM during the Federation Civil War was fundamentally the same as what he'd done in the War of Corporate Occupation, just with "a certain flavor of outlawry we didn't have back when a legitimate government was footing the bill." X-COM primarily busied itself with strikes against Psi Corps installations all across North America and Europe; in a twist of fate, one of the genetic modifications Doctor Valen had approved for widespread deployment rendered the person receiving it nearly immune to telepathic attack and compromise, and a higher proportion of these genemodded strike troopers had sided with Bradford than any other group. X-COM also busied itself with further crippling the EarthDome loyal remnant it had left behind; Doctor-cum-Commander Valen was an excellent scientist but in no way Bradford's strategic or tactical equal, although some of her increasingly monstrous strike troopers proved to be nasty surprises on more than one occasion.

On the Day of Reckoning, X-COM strike teams preceded either civilian uprisings or IPO/Galactic Alliance landings into many major urban areas, often decapitating vital command nodes prior to conventional assault. Bradford himself reportedly wanted to drop into Paris personally with STRIKE-1 in order to deal with President Clark and his associates face-to-face, but was waved off by the IPO at the last minute. STRIKE-1 had to content itself with reclaiming their recently-vacated original base and apprehending the erstwhile Commander Valen.

Granted amnesty and with their charter amended and restored, Commander Bradford and X-COM were rapidly and swiftly integrated into the Sheridan Provisional Government; the destabilization of the Federation Civil War had caused massive surges by Big Fire and other opportunistic entities seeking to cash in on the collapse of EarthForce and Starfleet and the subsequent overstretching of the military and law enforcement resources of the newly-minted Galactic Alliance. They operate closely in conjunction with the IPO, and discussions are underway to devolve operational (though not strategic) command of the entire Centauri sector to X-COM, freeing up IPO resources for use on the Outer Rim and Coreward Frontier.

Moira Valen vanished from her cell in January of SY 2413, days before her trial was to begin.

Her current whereabouts are unknown.

* * *

(Yes, this is what I spent my entire day doing. What of it?)

-Merc
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CdrMike
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Jan-21-14, 07:34 AM (EDT)
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14. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #13
 
   In the words of The Doctor, "Yowza!"

I have to admit, Vahlen has never struck me as outright villainous, just a little too eager to see where her research takes her. The methods of interrogation are brutal and she takes too quickly to some of the research, but in game the justification is that humanity's back is against the wall and any advantage is worth the cost. But even she had limits, such that she was appalled by some of the gene mods that EXALT was using, refusing to allow XCOM operatives to be changed in the same fashion. The comparison to Halsey is apt, as she's not so much evil as she is convinced that what she's doing is right, the consequences be damned.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

"You know, the world could always use more heroes." - Tracer, Overwatch


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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
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Jan-21-14, 10:11 AM (EDT)
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15. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #14
 
  
>I have to admit, Vahlen has never struck me as outright villainous,
>just a little too eager to see where her research takes her.

In the context of X-Com, sure. In the context of X-Com in the context of UF (double context score!) if anyone in X-Com were going to be the bad seed, it would be Doctor Warcrimes. Without Vahlen being a loyal servant of the state without much of a moral compass, my hypothetical is a lot less interesting, at least to me.

(Also, goddamit, did I get her name wrong? Shit. I did.)

>The comparison to Halsey is apt, as she's not so
>much evil as she is convinced that what she's doing is right, the
>consequences be damned.

I'd like to note that I always saw Halsey as pretty damn evil. The SPARTAN-II program wasn't developed to fight the Covenant; it was developed in order to keep Earth's bootheel on the neck of the colony worlds. The fact that it ended up saving everyone was a happy coincidence; absent the Covenant showing up, John-117 spends his career killing other humans in dubious, deniable circumstances.

Really, the UNSC is... not a nice government, and the people who work for it aren't nice people.

-Merc
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Gryphonadmin
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Jan-21-14, 10:46 AM (EDT)
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16. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #15
 
   >(Also, goddamit, did I get her name wrong? Shit. I did.)

Yes, you did. Dr. Valen is a different TV program entirely. Imagine a Dr. Phil-style let's-all-mock-these-monkeys "talk" show hosted by a frantically parodiacal Prophet Mohammed who is obviously a white guy in TOS-Klingon swarthy-face makeup, and you have some idea of how offensive to observant Minbari Ask Dr. Valen is.

>I'd like to note that I always saw Halsey as pretty damn evil. The
>SPARTAN-II program wasn't developed to fight the Covenant; it was
>developed in order to keep Earth's bootheel on the neck of the colony
>worlds.

Strangely, she's both more and less evil in UF because that wasn't the case. The Salusian SPARTAN-II project wasn't devised as a means of keeping colonies down, but there wasn't a good reason for it either; in fact, there was essentially no reason for it. SPECWARDEVGRU just sort of... did it because they could, and on the time-honored military-industrial principle that if you don't blow your whole two billion credits in research funding this fiscal year, you won't get it next fiscal year.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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CdrMike
Member since Feb-20-05
889 posts
Jan-21-14, 12:34 PM (EDT)
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18. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #16
 
  
>Yes, you did. Dr. Valen is a different TV program entirely. Imagine
>a Dr. Phil-style let's-all-mock-these-monkeys "talk" show
>hosted by a frantically parodiacal Prophet Mohammed who is obviously a
>white guy in TOS-Klingon swarthy-face makeup, and you have some idea
>of how offensive to observant Minbari Ask Dr. Valen is.

Proof that, even in centuries after it's invention, television remains a vast wasteland.

>Strangely, she's both more and less evil in UF because that wasn't the
>case. The Salusian SPARTAN-II project wasn't devised as a means of
>keeping colonies down, but there wasn't a good reason for it
>either; in fact, there was essentially no reason for it.
>SPECWARDEVGRU just sort of... did it because they could, and on the
>time-honored military-industrial principle that if you don't blow your
>whole two billion credits in research funding this fiscal year,
>you won't get it next fiscal year.

Seems more like the wartime belief that if something is crazy but it works, it isn't crazy. Cramming a genetically-modified humanoid into a 7ft tall suit of power armor that costs as much to build as a cruiser, turning them into a one-man army that can fight even the strongest members of the Covenant toe-to-toe and stand a good chance of winning? Sure, let's give it a shot, what's the worst that could happen?

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

"You know, the world could always use more heroes." - Tracer, Overwatch


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Gryphonadmin
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22374 posts
Jan-21-14, 01:24 PM (EDT)
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20. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #18
 
   >Seems more like the wartime belief that if something is crazy but it
>works, it isn't crazy.

The irony is that both the SPARTAN and MJOLNIR programs ultimately had some pretty positive knock-on effects. Less insanely extreme variants of the core SPARTAN modifications are commonplace in the 25th century, not only as soldier augmentations, but also on the civilian cyberware market, and the technology underlying a lot of the most popular prosthetics in the galaxy can be traced to the MJOLNIR line, which evolved after the Mk VI (and the discovery and shutdown of SPARTAN-II) into a cyborg-body platform rather than a powered suit. Unlike the SPARTAN-II operatives, though, the MJOLNIR Mk VIII and IX cyborg subjects were volunteers (as were the original SPARTANs, retroactively "SPARTAN-I participants", come to that).

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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CdrMike
Member since Feb-20-05
889 posts
Jan-21-14, 12:28 PM (EDT)
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17. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #15
 
   >In the context of X-Com, sure. In the context of X-Com in the context
>of UF (double context score!) if anyone in X-Com were going to be the
>bad seed, it would be Doctor Warcrimes. Without Vahlen being a loyal
>servant of the state without much of a moral compass, my hypothetical
>is a lot less interesting, at least to me.

No argument with her in that setting, I don't imagine women like her got very far under Clark's rule without being at least somewhat morally bankrupt.

>(Also, goddamit, did I get her name wrong? Shit. I did.)

Don't worry, first few times I heard the voice, I thought the "ah" there in the middle was due to her accent.

>I'd like to note that I always saw Halsey as pretty damn evil. The
>SPARTAN-II program wasn't developed to fight the Covenant; it was
>developed in order to keep Earth's bootheel on the neck of the colony
>worlds. The fact that it ended up saving everyone was a happy
>coincidence; absent the Covenant showing up, John-117 spends his
>career killing other humans in dubious, deniable circumstances.

"Evil" implies intentional malice, except Halsey never seemed to care enough about other people to ever rise to that level. In some ways, she's like Von Braun or Heisenberg, so wrapped up in her own research that she cares little for how it's used by others. She wasn't working the SPARTAN-II program because she believed in the goals or the ideals behind it, she just saw a problem in need of a solution and bent her genius to solving it.

>Really, the UNSC is... not a nice government, and the people
>who work for it aren't nice people.

Yeah, unified Earth governments in fiction seem to fall into one of two categories: Benevolent alliance created with the intention of bringing the best parts of humanity to the stars...or a power-hungry conglomerate which embodies the worst qualities of past empires and sees the stars as a ready source of resources to plunder.

--------------------------
CdrMike, Overwatch Reject

"You know, the world could always use more heroes." - Tracer, Overwatch


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Gryphonadmin
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22374 posts
Jan-21-14, 01:15 PM (EDT)
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19. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #17
 
   >Don't worry, first few times I heard the voice, I thought the "ah"
>there in the middle was due to her accent.

The funny part is, she's not pronouncing her name right anyway, if she's supposed to be German (or Austrian, or Swiss, or what have you). "V" in German is pronounced like "F", so it'd be "fahlen"; for it to be pronounced "vahlen" it'd have to be spelled Wahlen. Her VA's German accent is about as consistent as my Russian one, anyway. :)

>"Evil" implies intentional malice, except Halsey never seemed to care
>enough about other people to ever rise to that level.

She does routinely seem to be the sort of cautionary tale you get when you give a sociopath a blank check, but there are points at which her lack of routine human empathy is arresting even by those standards. The flash-clone thing, for instance. "Well, it might create an investigable pattern if all these children just disappear, but no one will notice a couple hundred extra cases of various tragic childhood wasting diseases. Or if they do, they'll look at the local chemical factory or something. Anywhere but at us." It's perfectly logical, and so utterly heartless it would make a Surakite raise an eyebrow and mutter, "Fuck me, that's cold, yo."

That's the part of the plan that ultimately got her sent to Takron-Galtos in UF, as it happens. SPECWARDEVGRU was authorized to develop Unconventional Force Multipliers, as "super-soldiers" are technically known in the jargon of the Royal Salusian Armed Forces. It was not authorized to abduct, experiment on, physically and psychologically brutalize, and in many cases cavalierly waste the lives of juvenile subjects of the Crown, or emotionally torture their parents, or develop an entire series of fully sapient artificial persons whose only function was to die horribly in short order.

In the dock on these charges, Dr. Halsey calmly maintained that, at the very worst, she was guilty of exceeding her instructions in an effort to do a better job, which led to the following deadpan exchange with the Crown Prosecutor, still taught in Salusian law schools:

The Rt. Hon. the Baron Vlatimyr, Crown Prosecutor
I put it to you, Doctor, that you have an interesting way of summarizing wholesale kidnapping and murder. "Exceeding one's instructions" strikes the Crown as a phrase better applied to, for instance, falsifying financial records so as to conceal a massive budget overage from Parliament.

Dr. Halsey
I work in weapons development. Surely that was already assumed as a matter of course.

Oh yes, she was a real piece of work.

--G.
"We don't torture people to create human superweapons. That's villain crap."
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Mercutio
Member since May-26-13
942 posts
Jan-23-14, 04:49 PM (EDT)
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21. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #19
 
   >She does routinely seem to be the sort of cautionary tale you get when
>you give a sociopath a blank check, but there are points at which her
>lack of routine human empathy is arresting even by those standards.
>The flash-clone thing, for instance.

Shit. I wanted to link it here... there was a very, very good story I read once that posited that the flash clone of John-117 was exactly as stubborn, lucky, and just-won't-quit as his genetic source was, and so by the end of the Covenant war you had this guy in his forties who looks about a hundred and twenty, crammed full of experimental cyberware and risky organ replacements, who had spent his entire life haunted by the notion that something made him this way, and who gets pretty fucking angry once the top gets blown off ONI's little horror show.

Can't seem to find it anymore, tho.

>Oh yes, she was a real piece of work.

Incidentally, thank you very much for expanding on what became of the good doctor in the context of UF. I'd been considering dropping that into the most recent "Ask G Anything" thread (or probably starting a new one, given how DCF has been feeling about necros) and now I don't have to! Never let it be said these forums aren't all about service. :)

-Merc
Keep Rat


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Offsides
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1264 posts
Jan-20-14, 01:09 PM (EDT)
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11. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #5
 
   >They wear giant fancy gems that telepathically broadcast
>"I AM A BIG DAMN HERO" to anyone they flash them at, I mean, that is
>not exactly something a modest organization comes up with. :)

I would argue that all it broadcasts is "I'm <lens wearer>. Period." The only additional thing it broadcasts is the undercurrent that the identification you've received is 100% genuine, accurate and verified.

It's up to the recipient to decide how they feel about that person, and what they think of them. I'm sure there are people out there who genuinely are afraid of Lensmen because of the propaganda they've been taught, but most people will likely not feel that way. Yes, I agree that it's not necessarily modest, but it's not particularly in-your-face over-the-top either...

Offsides

[...] in order to be a realist you must believe in miracles.
-- David Ben Gurion
EPU RCW #π
#include <stdsig.h>


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mdg1
Member since Aug-25-04
1325 posts
Jan-20-14, 03:56 PM (EDT)
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12. "RE: The IPO's Answer to the Magnificent Ten"
In response to message #11
 
   I believe he may be thinking of the canonical Lensmen, who do come across as a bit stiff and arrogant.

The EPU variety are much less uptight.

Mario


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