"I'm only inquiring about something that you are so adamantly trying to keep me in the dark about. It's senseless, Lex," he replies with stern civility. The posture isn't so convincing for him, he has seen it before-- sending the car to retrieve his son from a demolished hotel suite at 4 AM, sending an extractor to pluck Lex away from a seedy Metropolis nightclub, the defiant buyout of plant number three...all those glorious occasions of cleaning up a sizable mess.

He had almost started to regard that as the past.

"They say in chess that one must study the endgame before anything else, whether it's from losing or exploring even the most fatal possibilities. How do you really see this partnership with Mr. Veidt working out?"