Society for the Liquidation of Inferior Citizens Everywhere (S.L.I.C.E)
Soon after the publication of Darwin's “Origin of Species”, a wave of eugenic-fever spread across Europe. One group, initially composed of the university-educated younger sons of Hungarian, German and Polish noblemen, was more taken with the idea than others. They began as a political club, intent on establishing eugenics standards across eastern Europe, but when their movement was driven underground by the reactionary monarchies of the area, they turned to crime.
It was soon after that “Pip” Longfellow, an English confidence man and burglar, worked his way into the leadership of the world-wide group. He renamed the group “S.L.I.C.E.”–the Society for the Liquidation of Inferior Citizens Everywhere, because he was unable to pronounce the group's original Hungarian name. Pip also reformed the group from being a political group that used crime to support itself, into a criminal syndicate with a few political trappings.
S.L.I.C.E. operates by seeking out “superior individuals” and offering them technical and logistic support in exchange for cut of all their monetary intake. It defines a “superior individual” as someone with greater than average ability, who realizes that this ability makes him exempt from so-called “morality” and “social convention,” in other words, violent, narcissistic, megalomaniacs and pyschopaths. Such psychotic supervillians are known as the “Contributing Members” of S.L.I.C.E., and generally run their own personal campaigns of mayhem, with their own personal agendas. Contributing Members are encouraged to create all the havoc they can, but are induced by S.L.I.C.E. to move primarily against jurisdictions that refuse to pay protection money to the S.L.I.C.E. central committee.
The organization is run by a central committee made up of 3 powerful supervillians, whose identities are always secret. Commands are issued in the form of written or recorded “Decrees of the Committee” which must be obeyed by all members on pain of death. It maintains various secret bases across the world, and also claims the right to use the bases of members at will.
There are several divisions that answer to the committee. The Acquistions Division directs members to steal key technology for Society use. The Recruitment Division has agents who attempt to lure super-scientists to become evil and join the Society. The Human Resources Division recruits petty criminals, drifters and losers for use as both scientific test subjects and goons for the members' needs. The Risk Management Division is in charge of strong-arming governments and corporations into paying protection money and of dispatching assassins to deal with threats to the Society. The Logistics Division controlls all of the property of the Society and answers all requests for assistance from member villians.
For the budding superhero or super-scientist, the most commonly encountered element of S.L.I.C.E. is the variety of “hired help” that they provide for super-villians. While some supervillians prefer recruiting, training or creating their own henchmen, most find that the services of S.L.I.C.E. makes staffing matters so much easier. The most common types of these S.L.I.C.E. agents are: