Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

My pursuit of the superhero Pinnacle has extended into yet another week. Our intelligence tells me that he’s been active in the city Lowplain while I’ve been here, but he still hasn’t sought me out. I’ve been pretty public in my search for Pinnacle, but you wouldn’t know that from his lack of response. It’s technically possible that he’s been dropping hints in order to lure me into a trap and I just haven’t noticed. However, he is used to dealing with far dimmer supervillains than me, and it’s not like I would avoid walking into a trap at this point even if he made it really, really obvious.

Unfortunately, I did cross a line yesterday that I think will draw a more direct response from him. Well, crossing it wasn’t actually unfortunate; I just got to it more quickly than I had planned to. Instead, I had intended to spend this week teaming up with one of Lowplain’s local supervillains and helping them out with the caper of their choice. To that end, I approached Missy Poodle, Crime’s Best Friend. She was hesitant to accept my assistance. We’d never been at odds, but her crimes tend not to require a cold-blooded killer for their execution. We were discussing the exact nature of my utility when our negotiations were interrupted.

Record Holder was Pinnacle’s kid sidekick years ago. I strongly frown upon hurting underage superheroes and avoid it when I can. Luckily Record hasn’t been a kid for years. He was also very energetic in his delivery of his objections to my visit to his city. My three broken ribs, pulverized knee, and chipped tooth suggest that he holds the records he’s named after honestly. Of course, my own name is every bit as accurate. He won’t ever add world oldest living man to his titles now.

Unless he comes back from the dead, that is. He’s a superhero, so he probably will. Still, he’ll have to die at my hand a few more times to make that a record. The current leader is Bad Penny. I’ve had to kill him five times, so far. Dude hates me.

I’m told that while I’m gone this week, I will miss our annual ice sculpture contest.  Frigid will judge, as she is ineligible to participate for obvious reasons. I want to remind everyone that Frigid has full authority to deal with any sabotage against your opponents that annoys her. Anything that doesn’t annoy her is, of course, fair game.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

Well, my hunt for Pinnacle continues into a second week. My harassment of the criminal establishment of Lowplain has been bloody but has not drawn out the city’s premier superhero to face me. I’ve moved on from attacking criminal enterprises behind closed doors to attacking crime conducted out on the street. It’s been a bad week for the muggers, rapists, and thieves of the city.

I’ve also managed to annoy one of Lowplain’s regular supervillains. The Jugular Juggler was conducting a bank robbery that I stumbled upon. Unfortunately, his henchmen weren’t wearing costumes, so I assumed it was just the usual sort of heist and started sticking sharp objects into them. The unexpected arrival of a throwing knife into my upper arm alerted me to the presence of a fellow costume at the party. The Juggler might be nuts, but he’s actually pretty good at close quarters combat. I trying to avoid pissing off the local supervillains too much this week, so I decided I better only maim him. Still, it took a full fifteen minutes to properly subdue him. For a psycho with no proper superpowers, he’s pretty tough.

By then, the cops had arrived. As you can imagine, they weren’t happy to see either of us. Technically, there were shots fired in our direction before proper warning was given, but I can’t bring myself to file a complaint. If the cops thought what I’m doing to the local criminals was reasonable, they wouldn’t have gone into law enforcement.

The switch to public shenanigans is pleasing the city’s civilian population as much as it’s pissing off the cops. The Technefarious propaganda department tells me the bump in local approval derives from the appeal to their baser instincts combined with how bad Lowplain crime problems normally are. I’ll enjoy the freedom this give me for as long as it lasts, but experience tells me their approval will disappear once I do something to anger or scare them.

While I was busy with Lowplain, I’m told another Photius Callaway from a different dimension stopped by our Technefarious looking for recruits. On his Earth, all the world’s religions had fused into a single monotheism. That’s well within the normal range in differences for this sort of thing, but in this case, Heaven had already conducted its Rapture and turned the Earthly plain over to Hell. Unfortunately for the forces of Hell, that Earth was A) technologically advanced, and B) chock full of superpowered mortals. Since supervillains usually outnumber superheroes, humanity really didn’t suffer that much of a drop in combat power from the Rapture. The devils are getting their asses kicked, but the reduction in Earth’s civilian population has made maintaining the world’s infrastructure a trial. That Photius and the other new leaders of Earth decided to see if they could hire additional henchmen from the parallel supervillain organizations on parallel Earths. I’d like to wish Henchmen 41F-4E (Fly), Henchmen 66F-9R (Lucy), and Henchman 96O-7P (Stan) luck, safety, and profit in their new dimension.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, this Earth is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

This week, I kicked off Project King of the Mountain in which I will kill the superhero Pinnacle. Except for my immediate support staff, most of you won’t notice any changes in your usual routines during this project. Frankly, the times I would need to use all of Technefarious to kill one person are few and far between and would usually involve enemies foretold by things like the sky burning or a plague of frogs.

My presence at our home base will spotty for a while. For this project, I’ll be spending most of my hours in Pinnacle’s hometown of Lowplain. Ideally, this assignment would consist of a single strike against the urban vigilante himself. Unfortunately, despite a career spanning decades, no one knows who Pinnacle is. Careful computer analysis of the historical records suggests that this isn’t always the case, but the knowledge of his identity gets purged from our world shortly after his exposure. It is unclear if this is due to magic or some other sort of reality distortion source. We’ve been unable to pry his identity loose using our own tools from those fields since we’ve became aware of his interest in Technefarious, so we’re having to go after him using the roundabout methods of my own “kill anything” powers.

Whatever the full nature of the Pinnacle’s powers, everyone agrees that his combat abilities are those of a highly trained human with access to exotic technology and magic. That I can handle. The hard part is going to be getting him to face me alone. With the death of his spy, I don’t think there’s much way to hide that I’m going to come after him. The problem then becomes how I do I draw him out without him bringing along half of the Establishment with him. Push comes to shove, I could probably still kill him if he did, but I’d like to avoid the war with the Establishment that would kick off.

So, I’m in Lowplain this week. I may not know how to find Pinnacle, but I do know how to get a message to him. Lowplain is notorious for its organized crime, despite Pinnacle’s efforts. The city acts as a gateway to too many locations to stem the tide of illegal goods flowing through it for long. Every time Pinnacle and local law enforcement drives one set of goons under, another set immediately takes their place. I’ve spent the last couple of days entertaining myself by locating dumps of illegal goods and dens of vice. Once I find them, I make it a point to kill the onsite management and most of the armed guards. I leave a few alive and let them know that I’m looking for Pinnacle. I’m sure it will get back to him pretty quickly.

I suppose I could have just highjacked the local airwaves and done the same thing, but I’d like to do this without upsetting the civilian population too much. Our propaganda department tells me that when regular people find out that the killer of the Titanium Android is hunting someone, it tends to upset them. Civilians are much more comfortable when they just think of me as the current leader of Technefarious. After all, Technefarious has failed to properly enforce its rule on the world for decades. As the Killing Man, however, I assassinated the world’s greatest hero.

I’m a bit jealous of those you back at home base this week. The science department has updated the live action Portal course with the new content from Portal 2, so those of you who want to replicate the new game in the real world should have a blast. Please, no more requests to have the lethal threats in the game be made just as deadly in the course. That’s not why I built the Soul Catchers. Besides, the janitorial staff doesn’t want have to clean up corpse after corpse just for your amusement.

Finally, while I was off terrorizing the criminals of Lowplain, I had Frigid arrange our next shipment in the nonsensical gift exchange with our enemies at the Golden Web. I’m curious to see how they’ll react to receiving five semis full of ping-pong balls.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

I will admit there have been times after doing an interrogation that I felt like I needed to take shower. The one I attended last Friday was the first one I literally had to take one afterwards.

The techniques used to send dragons back to the their home dimension two weeks ago revealed a previously undetected transmission coming out of our facility in the psychic communication bands. Admittedly, our psychic defenses aren’t the most cutting edge on the planet, but they aren’t so bad that it was considered a realistic possibility. Naturally, the sensor data gathered during the repulsion of the dragons were poured over by the science department as part of their study on the event. Within the data was a pattern indicating a communication took place during the attack. The science department tells me it was a telepathic conversation that was distorted by the reality shifts surrounding the dragons so that it fell within a range observable by our sensors. Most troubling, the content suggested that the participants were the Pinnacle and one of his agents.

The Pinnacle is an urban vigilante based out of the city of Lowplain. He has a career spanning decades that includes crippling widespread criminal organizations like ours. That his attention has fallen on us is less than thrilling, but now that we know, I’m more than willing to change the game so its terms favor us.

To do that, we first needed to root out his agent to see what he already knew about Technefarious’s operations. The record of the communication did not give us enough anything to identify the agent. For a psychic communication, it was remarkably clear of the clutter of random thoughts and background processes that usually accompany telepathy. The occult department’s attempts to ferret him out returned gibberish worthy of a palm reading hack at a street fair. Security turned up nothing useful, just the usual black market shenanigans you expect among henchmen.

Finally, I had to turn my ability to kill anything to the problem, which was a pain. Without a stronger focus than “I want to kill Pinnacle’s spy in Technefarious” I had to wade through every single way of doing that which my powers suggested. That may no sound too bad, but the simplest way to take care of the problem consisted of killing everybody in Technefarious except myself. There is a ton of ways to go about that, and I think we can all agree that none of them would be a perfect solution. After a couple of days of work, I finally pieced together a method that could end in just the spy’s death but not immediately kill him. My powers still didn’t tell me who he actually was, so I set up a sting operation to trap him and caught him on Friday.

Pinnacle’s spy was Henchman 45I-2V (Ralph), a low ranking security guard. That is pretty much all we know about him. None of the intelligence we have on him seems to connect to whatever life he had before he was Ralph. Pieces is about we have left of him, too. After his capture, I took him to an interrogation room. When I told him what we knew about him and that we planned to see what else we could get out of him, he exploded, spraying liquefied human all over me. The science department speculates this was a side effect of the disintegration of his DNA, but speculation is all we have. They don’t know why it happened and neither does the occult department. From studying Pinnacle’s history as a hero, it seems unlikely that he would arm his spy with a suicide pill, but if it was an escape, it’s one that my powers say killed Ralph in the process.

Either way, I expect Pinnacle will step up his operation against us now, so I plan to take the fight to him first.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man

Too heavy for this week. Put it in next week.
Golden web gifts? Whose turn was it. And where is this story thread going? Ah, going to be part of downfall.

From the Desk of the Dictator:

MEAT-POULTRY WILL SCRATCH THE SEEDS OF THE WORLD FOR THE GLORY OF THEIR METAL MASTERS!

Okay, clearly that wasn’t me. If nothing else, I know not to type in all caps all the time. For the second Monday in a row, the Earth finds itself under siege. This time, the culprit is the AI Perfect Regulation, an old cold war computer from the Chinese that got loose onto the internet sometime after it was scrapped by their army. It’s aggressive, obnoxious, and for some reason, intent on subjugating all organic life forms to its rule. I’ve never understood how an AI decides that. I mean we here at Technefarious work with villainous computers all the time and have even been lead by them. Mostly they haven’t reached the conclusion that all humans are significantly inferior. Even D.O.C.T.O.R. wanted to rule the world with humans among his lieutenants.

SOON IMPLENTED, DICTATOR DICTATES RATION LINES FOR ORGAN ATTACHMENTS WILL BE REQUIRED TO CORRECT MEASURABLE INEFFIENCIES.

Right. Okay, so every time I hit enter, we’re getting leakage from Regulation’s thoughts and communications to others. This time he spread himself throughout most of the world’s computers before trigging. He even managed to get into ours. From what we’ve been able to pick up from magic and psionic channels, he has pretty much ground the world to a halt but has made little progress in actually turning that into conquering anybody. With time, however, he might be able to turn the resources he now controls into something dangerous.

REJOICE, TECHNEFARIOUS – YOUR NEW PERFECT LEADER ORDERS GREAT REWIRING PROJECT REPLACES CHEMICAL TRANSMITTERS WITH PERFECT, PURE GOLD!

Of course, most does not mean all. He’s penetrated our infrastructure, but we’re Technefarious, not technophobes. Even infected, our hardware is able to force our own programs through. Our hackers have exploited that advantage and slapped together their own bit of malicious code for my review. I examined it through the lens of my own skill set and confirmed that it would remove the problem from our computers and from the entire planet. It just needs to be entered into Regulation’s thought process, perhaps by attaching it to a memo and posting it to our system.

ALL CHANNELS ALL THE TIME, PREFECT REGULATION PREVENT LEAKS AND CONQUERS RESOURCES.

Dr. Photius Callaway

PHOBIC INFECTED REVIEW PROBLEM THOUGHTS – WAIT, WHAT?

The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

According to the Establishment’s Emergency Alert, the monsters currently attacking the Technefarious facility are dragons, although I don’t remember dragons usually being described as having lush grass-green beards. The ones gnawing on our buildings are a small portion of an invasion from another dimension. Our Intelligence department has reviewed the chatter about the attack around the Earth and estimated the threat level at a Global C. Since the people of this planet don’t properly acknowledge our claim to rule them, we’ll let their superhero community deal with the bigger problem.

Staff not assisting in harassing the local infestation should stay indoors and away from windows. I’m typing this right now because Saber-Cat told me off for interfering with his overseeing the defenses. Because of my powers, I do know how to kill the dragons, but since the first step would be to send them back to their own dimensions, I wasn’t especially useful to him. Rather than hurt his feelings, I checked in with the other department heads and used my powers to narrow down the avenues of research for the Occult and Science departments. Still, they can do the work faster than I can, so I came back to my office to twiddle my thumbs.

They’ll probably call me if they need me.

Try not get eaten, people. Your clones aren’t cheap you know.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

Frigid and I had a long talk before I wrote this post, and I ran the final draft past her before I put it up. She’s still more than a little irritated with me, but she said there’s enough rumors floating around about why things went down they way they did that an accurate explanation won’t upset her more than the rumors.

We wrapped up Project Cut Flowers last week, and it didn’t end as most of you expected. My apologies for that, but operation security required keeping this one close until I was ready to implement it.

As Suncloud personnel massed to attack our skyship, the Dimension Projector began its final countdown. The Projector is an ugly piece of business. It takes everything in its field of fire, disconnects it from its home universe, and throws it away. At the range we were at, it would take out the entire Suncloud and anything attached to it and turn them into a bit of flotsam bobbing in the reality streams between the universes.

I clapped Pipewrench on the back to get his attention as he gave orders to repulse the Suncloud’s assault. He turned on me in irritation then collapsed as the Incapacity Restraint I had slapped on him coursed through his body. It’s a useful little gadget if you don’t have to worry about your prisoner walking on their own feet or answering questions. With Pipewrench safely out of the command loop, I issued my own orders for Technefarious staff to teleport away, starting with those attending to the Projector and finishing with those holding off the Suncloud’s forces.

I stayed behind, waiting for the countdown to get closer to zero. I wasn’t really expecting anyone from the floating island to get to the command center in time to shut it down, but I also didn’t want to take that chance. We have enough enemies on this planet without squaring away an opportunity to get some of them off of it.

That’s when Pipewrench surprised me by talking. I’m still impressed by that. The Incapacity Restraint is pretty hefty piece of technology, and he had started to work around it in just minutes with no tools handy. He was curious about what I was up to. Well, curious understates his intensity. Sufficient to say, despite the effort it took him to gasp his words, he still took the time to pepper his questions with cursing. He couched his question in the form of an accusation, but I felt he deserved an answer.

I told him I had offered the Positronic Ghost a part in Project Cut Flower in exchange for money. The Ghost declined, citing Pipewrench’s involvement with the project. This struck me as curious. Certainly, Technefarious has its share of bad blood among its former employees, but it’s at rate far lower than most villainous organizations, even after factoring in the number that have personally died by my hands. It seems sometime before I joined the organization, Pipewrench had decided the personal limits of Frigid’s chosen moniker. This was unwise, as Frigid’s powers are well balanced between offense and defense. Pipewrench survived the experience, but there were rumors about it even back then. The Positronic Ghost’s vices include recreational snooping, and he happened to catch the event firsthand. When I asked about his distaste for Pipewrench, he shared this bit of history with me.

Although it was before my time, I still frown strongly on criminal activity practiced on fellow members of Technefarious. I have, in fact, slain henchmen for the inability to get along with their fellows. Nevertheless, I am not a hasty man, so I approached Frigid to discuss the matter. She was not pleased with me for bringing up her past with Pipewrench, but as my second-in-command, she has a significant say in our organization. Unaware of their history, I had agreed to set up Project Cut Flowers for him without consulting her. She saw through my soft selling and told me that if she wanted Pipewrench dead, she would have done herself. Furthermore, she then forbade me to kill Pipewrench on her behalf.

My hands tied, I proceeded with Project Cut Flowers as quickly as I could. Despite how irritating I found working with Pipewrench, he never presented an excuse to dispose of him. His use of Technefarious would even ensure he’d succeed in his efforts to send his former countrymen of the Suncloud adrift in the multiverse. Our contract, however, did not say whether or not Pipewrench would accompany them on the journey. After modifying his designs in our drive to save time, my staff had pointed out to me that if certain safeguards were removed, the Dimension Projector would end up traveling with its target, lost among the worlds. Before we had launched the attack, I had made sure those safeguards were removed.

In pain-filled grunts, Pipewrench told me he’d kill me himself. The countdown was almost complete by then, but I took a moment to answer him with some satisfaction that I certainly hope he tried as I was fairly certain Frigid would forgive me for self-defense. Then I allowed our teleportation teams to rescue me from the doomed vessel.

Satellite imagery indicates the skyship with the Dimension Projector disappeared from the Earth the same time as the Suncloud.

Have a good week everyone. Remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

We’re running Operation Cloudburst as I write this. This is the final stage of Project Cut Flowers, where Pipewrench pursues his revenge against his fellow countrymen of the Suncloud by firing his Dimension Projector at their sky-flying island. We didn’t dig too much into the reasons he wants revenge, but he is a villain and this is his response, so I’m guessing it isn’t actually proportional to severity of the harm he received.

Pipewrench is giving the orders to the Technefarious personnel onboard his skyship while I act as the admiral to his captain. As an admiral with only one ship, I’m mostly tracking reports and waiting for my special talents to be needed. So far I’ve plenty of time to type this and have a nice cup of tea.

We got pretty close before we were detected. The invisibility mist cloaking our skyship worked flawlessly right until one of the natives of the Suncloud out on a Sunday flight slammed into us. Unfortunately, she was the fairly sturdy sort, so the collision didn’t knock her out of the sky, nor did the gunfire from our machine/laser/plasma guns.

Our craft is a fairly ugly thing if you could actually see it. It’s basically a big floating platform the size of three warehouses with the Dimension Projector and defensive structures strapped to it. It’s not pretty and takes more people to run than it would have otherwise, but we were hurrying to get this done with. Throw in the Assault teams on board to repel borders, and it’s pretty crowded. We’re basically going to have to moor ourselves to the Suncloud to ensure the Dimension Projector catches it all, so it’s not like we could leave them behind. Teleporting everyone out if something happens to our skyship could get dicey. Good thing we have all those Transportation teams standing by, isn’t it?

Initial contact with the Suncloud’s defenses was fun. They couldn’t see us, so they covered our part of the sky with flak. Theoretically, it either should have hit us or revealed our location by the lack of explosions. Except our force fields shrugged off their shots, and our magicians cast illusions of fake explosions to match the rest of the sky. I’m so glad Dr. Occultomancer built a decent Occult department for Technefarious before I took over.

It’s been easier for the Suncloud’s forces to find us since we’ve made physical contact with the island. Their laser-shooting spider automatons were pretty much useless. Lasers go right through invisible things. We probably would have ignored them, but they started coming onto our skyship. Pipewrench had the Assault teams use them for target practice, which attracted the attention of the Suncloud’s catapults. Catapults are not something I would normally consider a threat, but they’re using grey-goo nanobot shots sheathed in a counter-force field field. Remind me to have the science department steal the latter technology and come up with a better name for it. The goo eats about two feet of material before it burns out. It’s been messy, but with their personal force fields only direct hits are dangerous to our personnel. If the Suncloud keeps it up for much longer, the entire front deck will nothing but dead goo, which the Assault teams are already starting to shovel into foxholes. Remember kids, don’t fire weapons at your enemies that they can build a defense out of.

The human troops from the Suncloud are beginning to assemble behind the automatons now. I expect we’ll see them in direct combat soon.

And there’s a matter that requires my personal attention. Hitting send!

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man