Where the heck is King Midas?

My feeling about the entirety of redside is that it's a marvelous example of the devs' reach exceeding their grasp. It feels very much like in the planning stages, there was some intent to get a whole lot of lore in there with all these new villain groups and special arcs to make it much different from blueside. Unfortunately, as things progressed they realized they didn't have nearly enough time to get all the new mobs and stories put together, so they threw in what they had, focused on a few key groups to give a complete level range to (Longbow and Arachnos) and smoothed things over to fit.

As a result, you see a lot of the "new" groups at the lower levels — Goldbrickers, Luddites, Legacy Chain, etc. but once the created mobs for these are outlevelled in the 30s, nothing is there to replace them. As a result, the majority of the high 30s is filled with Longbow, Arachnos and CoT and sprinkled with a few holdovers from CoH.

I don't remember that and I've run both contacts' missions multiple times.

Ah, I misremembered slightly where the info came from.

First is this mission from Doctor Creed, which ties the cesspool runoff to Dr. Geist's Arachnoid experiments, and from there the Arachnoids themselves tie into Project: Fury, which you learn about from the various mad scientists in Grandville.