Brainstorm!
You have gone underground. You have retreated to your secret lab. You have had time, information, years of preparation and the assistance of your old AI. You have a mission to destroy a corrupt government and overthrow the president (of AEGIS). I have two questions: Have you built a mecha suit? And, how big is your mecha suit?
While you're telling me about your preparation work for what will be the grand struggle of your life, tell us a bit about your secret lair, your downtime and what you're doing to stave off the descent into outright supervillainy.
Why does everybody always assume that Victor has a giant robot suit? Look, go to any of the local hacker forums, ask a random person what size their giant robot is, and you'll get a blank stare. Building a giant robot is all well and good for corporations. After all, they steal enough money from their workers and tenants that they can measure each other's robot dicks against each other. But for the average person, who
doesn't have nigh-infinite resources, building a giant robot is a sucker's game. The corps' robot is always going to be bigger than yours, or they'll have the resources to fund an army of smaller robots. And even if he
did have a robot capable of going toe-to-toe with all of AEGIS's might, you know that a robot like that would invite all of the other megacorps to temporarily put aside a their differences for an all-corp smackdown of this arrogant pretender.
That's why not one of his suits is larger than an above-average TAG. Smaller suits are more efficient; they can pack enough of a punch to be a credible threat, they're a harder target to hit, they can be faster and more evasive, and it's much easier to buy parts for them. (Seriously. Just go to the supermarket and try to buy alumisteel in the amounts needed to provide armor for a hundred-foot-tall kaiju-slaying robot. He'll wait.) It also means that he doesn't need to put all his eggs in one basket--this one can be the zoomie suit purpose built for out-flying and out-maneuvering missiles, this one packs power armor into a bracelet, this one is built to counter hardlight technology, this one shoves every chameleon technology he could smuggle or steal into one package, and so on.
As for the lair... do we have to call it a lair? Heroes don't have lairs. Heroes have hideouts. You don't call the ManCave a lair, and it's quite literally built in a cave, complete with stalactites and dripping ceilings that are a nightmare to keep out of the supercomputer. No, his
hideout, thank you very much, is sensible, clean, dare he even say a little bit cozy? He made it out of what used to be a subway station, back before some megacorp or other decided that public transit was less profitable than forcing everybody to purchase their own individual one-man vehicle. Its entrances are boarded up and cemented over, and most of them only show up in old archival metro maps. But it's a decent enough shelter--spacious, with plenty of room for a rudimentary workshop, some storage, a quick backdoor through some plastered-over sheetrock, and even a computer, though the lag is atrocious down here.
And Victor is very, most definitely, not descending into supervillainy. He's been pondering. Thinking over what Victoria said, right before she punched him through several walls. After all, why
not build up his own power? Make his own corporation? Decide to use his mind to... to... He can't quite bring himself to even think it.
Oh, sure, he can invent. He can create. His nanobot designs are well-patented, and those alone would probably make him a millionaire if he went public. But the problem he keeps running into is that he's only one man. And if he brings in other workers to produce his product, then he is morally obliged to pay them what they're worth. If they produce something worth two hundred dollars, then their work is worth that full amount, and that's what they deserve to take home. The only reason he'd make a corporation is to build enough power and money to compete with the other corporations, and the only way he could do that is to descend to the same strategies he started out to fight.
So that's been fun.
Really, he's mostly just been working to figure out ways to contact Bound Eage, Mami, and Sara without immediately having every corp down on him. He needs Bound Eagle to... well, apologize would still take priority. And then negotiate, and then plan. Baby steps.
Fetzen
Phoe
Lurking Krog