Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend to everyone.

This week we’re doing a test run on Pipewrench’s Dimension Projector. We’ve had to modify it from his original design. The destruction of his earlier build and my desire to wrap up this project means we’ve reduced the amount of automation needed to run the machine. However, that also means we’ll need more personnel to run the equipment. Throw in the assault and extraction teams I intend to bring along, and that calls for making a few shakedown flights before our attack.

I also want to take a moment to remind everyone that although this is Pipewrench’s project, I’m the one in charge. I would also like to remind Pipewrench that while I don’t arbitrarily kill my staff, I still find myself having to execute individual Technefarious employees on a regular basis.

Its overeager creator aside, the Dimension Projector is a slick piece of work. At its core is a Galaticguard Wrist Armory wired to the cutting from the Suncloud’s floating vine and enough Travel Apples to filled a garbage can. Flowing through that unnatural heart are arteries flowing with Cosmic Kinetic Fluid and Essence of the Southern Lights. It should have quite a kick when fired. I certainly wouldn’t want to be standing in front of it when it goes off. Once we have it in the air, we’re going to fire it on its lowest charge to see what happens.

We’ll also be testing the cloaking capabilities of the invisibility mist we collected. If it works against Technefarious sensors, it should hold up against those our target deploys.

For those of you not involved in Project Cut Flower, Frigid is going around this week collecting updates on the progress of some of our other projects. When we have this wrapped up, I have to make a decision on what we’re going to concentrate on next.

This week our propaganda department has decided to inflict culture on us. There will be a performance by some opera singers in Auditorium A on Wednesday if you’re interested. I’m not sure why they’re bothering. There hasn’t been a decent opera riot in ages.

Listen, nobody tell Green Needle about the opera singers, all right? She’d probably make me wear a tux.

In any event, I thought you all might like to know that another package arrived from our enemies at the Golden Web. It was an electronic pocket calculator from the 1970’s. It is still in its original packaging. Nine-volt battery sold separately. I’m going to have to consider our response.

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 to the base for everyone that attended Operation Invisible Distillation and a welcome back from your weekend to everyone else.

I’m writing this with tissues stuffed up my nostrils to deal with my bloody nose. I suppose I could go the medical department for something more dignified, but this is hardly the first time I’ve leaked the red stuff. It will stop soon enough.

This particular op took us to the mythical Caves of Oblivion, which aren’t as unappealing as they sound. Somewhere in prehistory, one of the lost pantheons of gods got into a fight with giant centipedes that were carved out of a mountain range. The Mountain Centipedes turned out to be terribly hard to kill but wouldn’t attack anything they couldn’t see. The gods dealt with them by filling a set of caverns with a mist that turned everything it touched invisible, tricking the bugs in the caves, and sealing the entrance behind them. Since no one else seems to have ever said, “Let’s go to that place where all those invisible monsters are stomping around. That seems like a good idea,” they’ve remained there unmolested for millennium.

We have no particular interest in the Mountain Centipedes, but that invisible mist they live in turns out to be perfect for part of Project Cut Flowers. Working together, the science and occult departments cobbled together some mist collectors, and I teleported into the caves with two of the extraction teams to deploy them.

I was going to have Frigid lead the teams, but Pipewrench insisted on coming along. Since he’s paying the bills on this one, I asked Frigid to mind the store while I kept him from getting killed. Upon reflection, this may have been a mistake, since we could have just stolen all of his stuff if he’d died. Oh well. Live and learn.

The deployment was a delicate business, since we couldn’t actually see anything inside the caves. Oh, we brought our sonar display goggles, but they turned invisible in the mist, seriously hampering their effectiveness. The caves are pretty big, but the bugs are still stomping around down there. Unfortunately, we lost Henchman 41L-9I (Sid) when he got stepped on. The occult department was unable to recover his soul. The divine nature of the Mountain Centipedes should have just destroyed it outright when they killed him, but the occult department tells me the enhancements of the soul catchers kept his intact. However, they could not reel it in before one of Death’s guides escorted him to the afterlife.

I earned the bloody nose at the end of the operation. We had siphoned off enough of the mist that contents of the cave were starting to emerge as faint shadows. I’d love to be able to blame Pipewrench for the injury, but it wasn’t his fault. In addition to our sonar goggles, we were also wearing personal cloaks so we would stay invisible as the mist faded. Unfortunately, the cloak for Henchman 38E-5J (Yuri) failed. One of the giant bugs noticed him within moments. I got smacked in the face knocking him out of the way of the bug’s strike. Once we were clear, a heavy weapons team pumped rockets into the Mountain Centipede, crippling it. Apparently, the problem they had with the bugs in the past was a lack of firepower.

By then we were teleporting collectors and personnel out of the caves, so I came back to my office to tend to my bloody nose and type up this memo. I think I’m going to goof off for a while now. Try not to tear down our organization for the next couple of hours. 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’d like to officially announce here that the scope of Project Cut Flowers has been expanded. This is a result of my meeting last week with former Technefarious lieutenant Pipewrench. A native of the Suncloud, he joined Technefarious because our style matched his, but he left us before my immediate predecessor had taken control of our organization. He’s a big man, well suited to pounding on the steampunk machines he likes to build.

The destruction of one of those clockwork devices is what brought him to us last week. So far, Project Cut Flowers has consisted mostly of stockpiling materials for Pipewrench to run through his construct. We don’t normally do mercenary work, but Pipewrench used to be one of us and was paying very well. Since we now have nearly all the things he needs, he wants to expand our contract to have us rebuild his Dimension Projector in a timely manner and to assist him in its eventual launch. I cleared it with Frigid, then told Pipewrench we’d be setting aside our own operations for his, so I’d have to charge him a great deal of money. He agreed. Then I asked exactly what happened to the one he had been working on.

It seems that he had kidnapped the heiress Persephone Guilder. He assures me his demand for her ransom was not an indication of a lack of money but just a routine operation to ensure a steady cashflow. Since I had already had the computer department hack into his bank accounts, I believed him. However, living in the world that we do, a superhero had taken it upon himself to arrange for the release of Ms. Guilder without an exchange of money. Unfortunately, that hero was Grogan the Giant Lizard-Gorilla, who is roughly six stories high and well known for his property damage skills. By the time Grogan had extracted Ms. Guilder, half of Pipewrench’s base was rubble and his Dimension Projector’s assembly strongly resembled a large golden pancake instead of a three dimensional Rube Goldbergian clockwork. Hopefully, we’ll be able to avoid a similar mess this time.

Tonight, the propaganda department has hired the Demented Resistors to do a concert for us. The musicians have been mind-altered to think they’re playing a corporate gig for the Technalysis Foundation, so everyone can relax and enjoy the show. The Demented Resistors opened for Power Bow on his last tour and are supposed to be really good. I’m looking forward to it.

On Tuesday, we’ll be holding a memorial service for Henchmen 84U-4B (Rachel) from the science department. Technically, she isn’t dead, but the experiment she was working on pulled her into a non-string based dimension and transmuted her body to let her survive there. We’re not sure exactly how it happened, and we don’t have a clue how to reverse it. Decades of Technefarious history suggest that it is best to memorialize her now.

In the latest news of our package exchange program with our rivals at the Golden Web, I sent them back a glass jar full of mutilated gummy bears. Two headed, multicolored monstrosities will stare at the recipient with twin blank gazes. Perhaps the jar’s new owner will recoil for the horror of seeing three gummy butts sealed together. Probably not – no one has ever called the Golden Web wimps. Well, except for the Powder Keg, but that’s only because their answer to everything is to blow it up.

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. Turned out to be a bit more eventful than we all expected, didn’t it?

It started with a birthday party. Alpha and Gamma of the Elite Triad decided to hold a surprise party for Beta. I’m not sure why, since they’re almost one person anymore. Originally designed by D.O.K.T.O.R., the E.L.I.T.E. series were built by the second most famous leader of Technaferious to test ways to improve his own software. He used the same operating system for all three, thus Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. However, the three ended up getting along so well that they started regularly integrating their software and memories together. Nowadays, if you talk with one of them, you’re talking with all three of them, even if they are halfway across the planet from each other. I can understand why two of them would want a surprise party for the third; I’m just not sure how they managed to make that decision without involving him. Also, I don’t know why Beta is a “he” and Alpha and Gamma are “she’s.” Gamma is a short, androgynous robot, so I can kind of see that one. And yes, I’ve heard the joke about Beta being a tank with a really big turret, but Alpha is a big silver obelisk, which is just as phallic as that turret. I guess I’ll just chalk it up to the whimsies of our silicon people. 

Naturally, since Beta is literally a tank, we held the party in the parking garage. We were going to have it out in the yard, but weather control involves using forces that the Establishment can usually detect pretty easily and it rained. Unfortunately, the bustle of setting up for the party let a security breach get past our receiving department. We are stockpiling Cosmic Kinetic Fluid for Project Cut Flowers, and the latest shipment of had just come in. There are legitimate industrial uses for the explosive CKF, but not many for the amount we’ve been diverting. I suppose it was inevitable that someone was going to notice. I guess I should be just as glad that it wasn’t an Establishment strike force that snuck onto our base.

Once the party was well underway, someone discovered Henchman 11E-7P (Ned) had been knocked out, stripped naked, and tied up. I suppose in another profession, this would have set off an immediate alarm and stopped the party instead of being considered merely slightly rougher than the usual party shenanigans. Once the medical department revived him, however, he told them it was an intruder, later identified as the vigilante Flutterdie, who had attacked him.

Flutterdie is a butterfly-themed superhero wearing a powersuit created by a sorcerer from another planet, which is only a slightly more exotic than usual explanations for superpowers that I’ve heard. It’s not really a power set suited for sneaking around, which is why she stole Ned’s clothes. It is a power set good for fighting, so when the security squad finally intercepted her, she blasted her way out with her twin pistols. Everyone in the squad received injuries and Henchman 65N-7T (Turner) was killed permanently. The enchantments on her weapons nullified his connection to our soul catchers when they hit him, putting his recovery beyond our reach.

With the rest of us involved in the party, Flutterdie managed to fly away before we could move to stop her. Luckily, as a vigilante she isn’t a certified officer of the Establishment, so her contacts with them are weak enough that we didn’t immediately have the heavy hitters of the superhero world breathing down our necks. That let us do a more orderly transition to our new base than we usually manage, so our operations resumed as normal today.

The Noir Club is holding a Purple Poetry reading Tuesday night, and Henchman 43E-2W (Sherlock Stupendous) of the Occult department is doing a magic show on Thursday. I hope someone has screened his act ahead of time. The last time we had an amateur showman from that department, it took us three weeks to get all the gremlins out of the equipment. Consider yourself warned, Stupendous.

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

Update: Bleach tells me Alpha is phallic like a dildo, thus earning her the female designation. Thanks, Bleach.

I downloaded Champions Online a couple of weeks ago when it went free to play. Tried to get into it last week but got bored with the character creator. Not the stat building, because I chose my class pretty much at random. No, I got bored trying to figure out what my character would look like. 

I took another run at it last night, using Epiphany as my starting point since she’s one of my few superheroes whose costumes I know what they should look like. They didn’t have labcoats, so it ended up not being Epiphany. However, they did have some wicked looking butterfly wings, eventually giving us FLUTTERDIE:

 

Origin: Long story. Let’s just say that alien sorcerers are strange.

 

 

This is the default stance for female characters. I switched to the action pose.

I needed a vigilante type in Monday’s Dictator memo, so I think I’ll use my new hero there.

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

It was quiet this week. We ran another segment of Project Cut Flowers, but this one did not require mobilizing all of Technefarious, so it’s understandable if you didn’t notice it. Operation Grass Clippings only required a couple of people to complete, so I assigned it to Frigid and myself. It was nice to get out of the office without being abducted by aliens or trying to oversee a small army in the field.

Operation Grass Clippings required a trip to the floating city of Suncloud. If you’ve never been, you’ve missed one of the wonders of the world. No one knows exactly how old it is, although it is referenced in Homer’s Odyssey. Somewhere in prehistory, a vine plant mutated or got hit by miscast magic or was the subject of a miracle, allowing it to exhale a mist that made it float free of the ground. For whatever reason, this floating planet didn’t die but instead grew bit by bit. Eventually, some bits of it did die, but the dried husks stayed entwined with the living vine. Slowly the plant grew larger and its discarded bits accumulated, turning into a floating mound and then into a floating hill and finally into an entire island buoyed by its white cloud of gas. Over the millennia, it accumulated passengers: birds, bugs, dirt, flowers, weeds, and trees. Occasionally it was tamed by a wizard or a god that wanted the living cloud for their own reasons, but mostly it wandered the planet, a little island of life in the sky. Eventually, it was colonized during Europe’s Age of Exploration. However, the European powers found it impossible to control the island’s course, making it difficult for them to do regular business with the floating colony. Finally drifting away from their old homes, the former colonists dubbed their land the Suncloud and developed their own independent culture that specialized in flight long before the Wright brothers developed the propeller driven airplane.

Frigid and I slipped onto Suncloud by the simple expedient of teleporting onto it. Flying is a poor option for sneaking in, because the Cloudians have developed the best flight detection systems on the world. Teleporting in was better. Oh, they still detected our arrival; it just made intercepting us harder. By the time their security forces reached our arrival point, we had already disappeared among Suncloud’s many tourists.

To give security time to settle down, Frigid and I pretended to be tourists and went shopping, giving me an opportunity to prove to my lieutenant that the stereotype of guys hating to shop is entirely true. Frigid chose her name deliberately, having been born with ice powers and no sex drive. Talk to her for a while, and you’ll find she finds the contortions the rest of humanity goes through for sex amusing. Apparently, she managed to have avoided going shopping with any guys in her life so far and found it hilarious that I lived up to the male reputation. I just smiled at her patiently and told her that the real reason I seized control of Technefarious was so I could make the henchmen do my shopping for me.

After stopping for some coffee with floating foam (a Suncloud speciality), we made our way to the edge of the island to try and find some plant matter to prune. The forests there had plenty of exposed stalks of the floating plant, but we wanted to do this with more subtlety than Jack and the Beanstalk. We finally found a sprout shorter than us, so I used my powers to figure out how to trim it off without killing it. Then Frigid encased it in ice and manipulated the temperature of the water inside of it to preserve its cells without letting them rot, or so I gathered from the long, detailed explanation of her process that she shared while she went about it. I didn’t actually understand it all, but as long as our science and occult departments are happy with her work, then I’m happy.

Of course, our attempt to teleport back out was immediately foiled. Despite our efforts to skirt security, they had managed to track us down. The squad was mostly just grunts, but I recognized their leaders. The first was Shiver, a young woman with a vibration based power set. The other was Caesar Rex, the Mechanical Canine-Man, my rival in having a completely ridiculous mix of names and titles.

Rex gloated that he had caught us and boasted about the jammer he was using to keep us from teleporting away. It wasn’t a bad little monologue, but I thought it was bit presumptuous of him considering he hadn’t subdued us yet. Oh, I won’t pass up a good monologue myself, but I do have priorities.

In this case, my priority was has to extract ourselves without killing anyone. Sure, we’re facing a couple of superheroes and some extra muscle, all of whom are usually expendable, but murder is more memorable than property damage and theft. At worst, I wanted us to be an annoying escape, not a focus for vengeance. Our teleportation device’s countermeasures had started processing as soon as it found itself blocked, so it would eventually get us out. The question was how to keep our opponents busy in the meantime.

Luckily, I had Frigid with me. Like any good ice slinger, the first thing she did was encase our opponents in blocks of ice. If she had been able to concentrate on maintaining the blocks’ integrity, that would have been enough to let us get away. Unfortunately, Shiver’s vibrations tore down her ice cube prison almost immediately. The hero threw herself at Frigid, forcing a standoff between Shiver’s excitation of atoms and Frigid’s storm of ice.

In the meantime, Caesar Rex and his goons had managed to extract themselves from their blocks, but I was waiting for them. Killing someone is much easier than disabling them, but I am highly trained. I served concussions and severed tendons to the help, then delivered an arrangement of sharp strikes and crushing blows to Caesar Rex, incapacitating his capacitors and grinding his gears. With his mechanical bits damaged, he dropped the jammer. That wasn’t what I was going for, but I stomped on it anyways, teleporting us away and ending the fights.

I told Frigid that the next time, maybe she should start the fight by destroying the equipment preventing our escape. She said thanks for the brilliant idea after the fact.

This memo is long again, so I’ll just write one quick note here about our package exchanges with the Golden Web. This time, our archrivals sent us a box full of the stiff, deadly gum sticks that comes with baseball cards. The science department was able to determine the entire lot of gum dates to the mid-1980s. Yeah, I have no idea what’s going on over there.

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.

Operation I-Should-Have-Probably-Named-It-But-It-Wasn’t-Part-Of-One-Of-Our-Take-Over-The-World-Plots-So-I-Didn’t was a success with some additional positive, if unexpected, results. We successfully rescued the soul of Henchman 98B-3O (Carl), which we expected, but it looks like it may have resulted in a proper secret origin story for him too.

First, let’s talk about the actual execution of the rescue. Carl’s soul was being held by the dragon statue Granquartz. Our occult department prepared some materials, and I hired the Positronic Ghost to deliver them to since he could complete the job more quietly than anyone currently on staff.

The Positronic Ghost was built by one of the former leaders of Technefarious, Dr. Masivo. The doctor had found that building a sentient computer was easier if the materials used were entirely antimatter. Unfortunately, antimatter has a bad habit of exploding when it actually touches anything on Earth. Masivo addressed that problem by building the entire thing slightly out of phase with the rest of the world. As a result, it could seen and heard and but not touched. In keeping with the theme, he built his computer an antimatter body of a seven-foot tall robotic skeleton dressed in rags. Dr. Masivo had a sense of humor.

I’ve always liked the Positronic Ghost. Sure, his attention span isn’t great, and you have to prod him sometimes to get moving again, but he’s a pleasant (if occasional abstract) conversationalist. I was sorry when he left us to pursue his own projects.

Positronic Ghost snuck Granquartz’s lair and coated the stone eggs in her nest with the dragon semen our occult department had prepared. Now fertilized, the eggs quickened within a couple of days and then hatched. Carl was reborn with his soul now attached to a body of baby dragon statue. The other eggs had also hatched with other souls Granquartz had captured. In the confusion of the dozen or so sudden births, Carl escaped from the Soil Six’s base and flew back to us. Apparently learning to fly with a body made of stone is easier than you might think.

The occult department has reattached Carl’s soul to a clone body but found that they did not have to detach it from the dragon statue. So if you see the clone or the statue walking around, keep in mind that they are both Carl. Given his unusual condition, we’re evaluating him to see what additional training and duties might be suitable for him.

Later in this week, the science department will start their battle robot contest. Be sure you get your filled out elimination brackets to Dr. Ratchetman by Thursday morning to have a chance at winning the betting pool.

I have one quick note on the package exchange program with our enemies, the Golden Web. They haven’t sent us anything back yet, but Frigid noted I should have put a mesmerizing subliminal in the Manimal Betamax tapes I sent the Golden Web. So thanks, Frigid, for the brilliant idea after the fact. I’m going to go be grumpy now.

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.

For those of you wondering how I was going recap the end of last week’s reality rewrite, I’ll say that the solution involved a cartoon animal orgy. Now let us never speak of it again.

Rather than press on with one of our big projects this week, I authorized the recovery of Henchman 98B-3O (Carl). We lost him during our operation against the Soil Six when he was eaten by Granquartz the Magnificent, the giant living stone dragon statue that makes her home in the Six’s base. Normally, we would have just brought Carl back by putting his soul into a clone of his body, but after the battle his soul did not show up in the Technefarious’s soul catchers. Our occult department determined that Granquartz had somehow ensnared Carl’s soul during the fight.

While I was away last month playing with aliens, our wizards figured out a way to extract Carl from Granquartz’s claws. Most of the process could be accomplished using in-house resources, but there a few aspects that needed to be brought in from outside. I took it upon myself to arrange for their acquisition, which means I got to call Bleach into my office and tell him to bring me five gallons of dragon semen. I love being the supervillain in charge.

He succeeded in his mission, but refused to discuss the details after he got back. I thought that was a little odd. I mean dragon semen isn’t as useful as dragon blood, but it is available on the black market. He would have just told me if he bought it, right?

The occult department did their work on the materials Bleach had acquired, and then all that was left to do was to deliver the load. I decided to go with a more subtle approach than our last attack on the Soil Six’s base. Since Quanquartz’s quarters are in the caves in the back of their base and we weren’t trying to steal anything out of it this time, I went with a phase-shifter to sneak in. No one currently on our staff specializes in that power set, but I make it a policy to stay on good term with former Technefarious employees whenever possible. I contacted the Positronic Ghost and he has agreed to make the run for a tidy sum.

There were no henchmen deaths to memorialize this week. Hopefully, that’s a good sign for this operation.

In another news, the Golden Web responded to cremated remains of their agents, the note, and the bomb we sent them the other week. They responded by sending back a fruitcake with a file baked into it. The science and occult departments tell me that it doesn’t seemed to be booby trapped or otherwise stranger than it appears to be. I had it teleported to one of our storage facilities in the asteroid belt to play it safe. I responded to the Golden Web’s puzzling package by sending them a set of pirated copies of the television series Manimal recorded on Betamax tapes. I had the commercials left in.

This week’s recreational activities include the propaganda department screening a marathon of Larry Lemur animated shorts in auditorium A. I won’t be attending.

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