Pierce in the Hellfire Club
Pierce is deeply bigoted against mutants, so what the hell is he doing in the Hellfire Club working for Sebastian Shaw?- Shaw has vast resources of money, manpower and technology and very few scruples. Whilst working for a mutant may be very distasteful to Pierce, if doing so means he gets to express his loathing against a whole lot of other mutants then it will be worth it.
- The Doylist explanation is that he wasn't anti-mutant originally, or not fanatically at any rate. That's an element of his characterization which was added much later. In a Watsonian sense, as noted, both Shaw and Pierce are quite capable of Pragmatic Villainy.
