Stratton went of his own volition to meet with an unproven troupe without the most important member of his security detail.
Gloria, Christine, Susanne, etc, are guarded by a small army of powered beings, and one of the honest-to-God strongest navies in the whole world.
Taking advantage of a bumbling fool is one thing. The attack on the G7 is… quite another. 
Wait until the League finds out.
What I meant was that at that time (of the jump), the cult had control of the US president. And instead of using him, they… had him jump off a building.* So “getting rid of western leaders” is already on the table.
(joking, take your time 
)
I would be half expecting for, say, Forlorn to say it was a good plan when he found out about it, but after, YA KNOW, he probably reeeeeeally doesn’t like how the whole thing turned out.
*this means, as if we didn’t already know it’s par for the course for religious zealots, that nobody with any deciding power in the cult has a functioning brain. Unleeeesssssss, of course, somebody with a say had a vested interest in removing Stratton and making Gloria president instead for reasons that had nothing to do with policy.
Oh, well, yes. But again, there’s a difference between “if this guy is dumb enough to give us a gun and kneel” and “We will break through all your defenses in order to get you”. There’s a difference in… willingness, you could say.
Flinging Stratton off was taking advantage of an opportunity. Attacking the G7 is putting your head in the Lion’s mouth and daring it to clamp down.
But if the goal is just to make Gloria president, why try to kill him now?
They seemed like a good puppet before they got to power and now they look too uncontrollable (for them whoever it’s them); there’s a scene in one of the The Pope series (the second I think it was) where one of the priests seemed to be a willing guy to be ordered around but the moment he’s made Pope he “reveals” he ain’t taking shit from none
ARE they trying to kill him now? Because nobody actually made a move against him. Even the two dumbasses who decided it was a good idea to assault a room with a dozen supers with nothing but rifles don’t actually shoot, and they have the opportunity to just open fire, because they have the opportunity to tell people to get on the ground. So killing the G7 leaders isn’t the goal here. Or at least not ALL G7 leaders. In fact, if they want to kill ANY G7 leader and didn’t open fire from the get-go, that suggests there’s somebody in that room they specifically want to be NOT shot.
They already had a full-on puppet with Stratton, though. If they could get him to jump off a building, I’m pretty sure they could get him to do anything else (except possibly not being a dick, because things that go contrary to your fundamental nature let you reroll saves).
I suppose we will soon see. 
The Cult’s goals are… not beyond your understanding, but definitely not based on the motives you’d expect.
Cat emoji and not expected, they’re serving the Cat Overlords and they want to make an enormous ball of yarn
They want tuna fishing to be ramped up to the maximum, ecological considerations be damned!
I vote Stratton, Mars may not like the guy but he does owe him for getting him out of the bad situation he was in as a kid of the working poor when he first got his own superpowers.
That is also not true, Mars is far more smart and perhaps more cynical too than he lets on at first glance. You only get to see smart/erudite Mars if you go on his date but there are hints that he is no slouch in the library section too.
If that is true it would be more to Stratton then to Gloria or the US since I believe Mars is not officially secret service but privately employed by one of Stratton’s companies.
That is true. Before the whole superhero thing, as a simple college kid, my mc was probably already firmly in the Maia wing of Revo party.
Which means it is not our feline overlords as that would be beyond our understanding.
As an aside why does the forum still not have the evil cat emoji?
Reading all of these stuff about Gloria and Stratton made me want to drop my 2 cents as well.
Personally, at first I did like Gloria when he was first introduced and my MC had the thought “better him than Stratton” due to Stratton being quite similar to a certain person. But now after seeing the new content that was added, I get a gut feeling that Gloria is also using the League for his own benefit and is going to be the exact reason why the Broken King or Crete may come to fuck shit up and wipe the floor with every hero. He’s been said to be a soldier so of course his mentality is going to be stuck in a solider’s way which may backfire on him seeing how he used the G7, their hero security details and the League as bait. People does not respond well to being used as bait.
“The easily-provoked dragon is sleeping. Let’s poke it with a sharp stick.”
One does have to wonder how Crete has remained independent and never been conquered after more than a thousand years of being surrounded by Empires that definitely wanted it…
I’m sure the Queen would have liked for Crete to remain free. Maybe she has something to do with that.
Even if indirectly, because if that was her dying wish (or ANY wish, really. Or if she just mentioned it in passing one day), I’m pretty sure the King will turn anything that so much as looks sideways at Crete into the mincedest of meat.
If you asked me, I’m not buying “the Queen is dead and buried” schtick. At the best, she probably fell into some kinda coma from the backlash of her powers of whatever it may be or she went into hiding and made everyone think she died. If the Broken King can supposedly live for thousands of years then I just can’t believe all of these evidence that says she’s dead.
Edited to add: Also there’s the fact that both MC and Lat are apparently the only ones who has the Other Yous which makes me think that kind of connection between them might be related to the BK and the Queen.
Since the king and queen were mentioned I always suspected mc and lat having a connection to them somehow. Either recantation’s of them or powers similar to theirs
Our Other You really DOES come off as someone who would have “win to protect” as a shtick (as opposed to the Queen’s “protect to win”), don’t they? They certainly like violence.
I get a feeling that the Other You’s battlelust that affected the MC actually comes from the King and Queen. But everything from Other You seems to be preparing the MC and Lat for the eventual battle with the BK and Queen. I mean, why did they tell MC and Lat to reach a [insert hero name]'s level within a time limit? Hmmmmm…
From what we know, the Queen didn’t have battle lust - it’d be a bit antithetical to her “protect to win” shtick.
Eventual battle with SOMETHING, surely, but I’m not convinced it’s the King and Queen, because from what we know those two are ostensibly the GOOD GUYS.
Fun thing to note:
The Aegean Cataclysm, which was the disappearance of all the Aegean Islands except for Euboea, Crete and Rhodes, happened in 966.
Which is a few years after the King and Queen took over Crete.
Now, I’m not saying they’re involved, but if anyone knows what happened there…
Unltil Gloria gets the brilliant idea to get the G7 to work together to get to Crete and get inside the mountain with superheros. Something tells me that if Gloria did it, BK’s response to his wife’s tomb being torn apart for whatever will be absolutely catastrophic