Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Dictator:

If you’re reading this, our usual universe is offline. While our paradox implants means that most of Technefarious is around in their original forms, the rest of the universe has been turned into a Mad Max post-apocalypse world inhabited by cartoon animal versions of all the superheroes and supervillains who don’t have paradox implants. Apparently, Larry Lemur the Living Cartoon was cheating with Universan of the ApocoCreatures, when his girlfriend Malicia Ravenwitch caught them in the act. As the domestic fight escalated, the three accidently rewrote the universe. We’re trying to fix it.

I’m typing this on my communicator so those extra-universal beings tapping into Technefarious’s internal memo system for their own entertainment don’t wonder why I didn’t write a memo this week. It’s too expensive to make our whole base paradox proof, so our usual equipment doesn’t exist for the Technefarious staff to read. So this is just for all you extra-universal voyeurs out there.

My usual posts for actual Technefarious staff should resume next week. Unless the fuzzy cartoon people kill us first.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

It’s good to be back. For those wondering where I was at the end of last week, I took a few days off. Escaping from the clutches of some deeply disturbed aliens was exhausting, so after I got back, I spent a couple of days at home catching up on my sleep. What’s the point of being charge of a supervillain organization if you can’t take a personal day now and then? Speaking of which, why did anyone place bets that I was actually on vacation with Green Needle in the betting pool about my disappearance? I’m a SUPERVILLAIN. Taking a vacation with a beautiful woman is the cover I use for committing criminal activity. Why would I lie about getting abducted by aliens to cover up my getting laid? The odds that Frigid had secretly staged a coup and had me assassinated was a safer bet.

Speaking of whom, I’d like to extend a special thanks to Frigid for keeping Technefarious ticking along while I was unavailable. I have reports on minor advancements of several projects while I was away. I’m happy to report I brought back my own contribution to our work from my trip. Among the materials I had Fusion Man make for me back on the Asyms’s ship were two energy collection rods that we were using months ago to gather his signature radiation for Project Cut Flowers. He didn’t know what they were, and I collected a lot in the short time we worked together since he was using his powers instead of just sulking in a cell.

Still, not everything during my absence was betting pools and serendipitous radiation collection. Frigid had to deal with her own insurrection while I was away. A half-dozen henchmen tried assassinate her, Bleach, and the Elite Triad. Strictly speaking, it was not a coup because they were acting on behalf of the Golden Web. Technefarious’s rivalry with the G.W. goes all back the way back to our founder, Dr. Crankpot. They tried to recruit the good (evil) Doctor at the beginning of his career, but he rejected them. Even as a youngster, he was a cranky old bastard that didn’t like taking orders. Technefarious grew out of the henchmen Crankpot surrounded himself with, so naturally we bumped heads with the G.W. in our competition to conquer the world. The current leaders of the Golden Web decided my absence was perfect time to strike at us.

I executed Henchmen 85G-0U (Charlie), 35S-6N (Hank), 91Z-0U (Robert), 43F-1L (Archie), 27L-5L (Scott), 21V-6C (Jean) for their infiltration of Technefarious on the Golden Web’s behalf. While we mull our response options, I had their ashes shipped back to the G.W. with a note and a bomb attached.

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.

To recap the last few weeks: others and myself were kidnapped by aliens freaky even by alien standards in that their species isn’t particularly genetically stable. Shine dubbed them Asyms due to their asymmetrical bodies. The Asyms spend their spare time seeking out the best genetic arrangement by pitting their abductees against each other and themselves in combat. I probably would have just introduced them to one of universe killers that live on Earth if they had just asked nicely, but they weren’t really interested in taking tea with me.

Instead, they dumped me in with Green Needle, Fusion Man, and Shine Jackson. That would be a medical doctor who specializes in killing things, a biologist specializing in creating exotic alterations in the living, a superhero with easy access to the entire spectrum of fusion/fission reactions, and a blogger for whom bizarre adventures is a common place. Apparently they couldn’t see the trouble that combination might create.

First, they let us keep our basic equipment, because they consider tools part of a being’s genetic expression. Fusion Man brought his pocket lint, I brought my Technefarious communicator and a few sharp objects, Green Needle brought her apothecary-in-a-gun and a few other tools, and Shine brought his tablet and cell phone. Really, I’m selling Shine short. Sometime during his adventures, he picked up a bunch of different super-science widgets and crammed them all in normal looking computer equipment. Universal translator? Check. Full EM spectrum wifi recognition? Check. Local area sensor suite? Check. Media editing? Check. Using the wifi to connect to the Aysms’s computers, Shine hacked into their system using the universal translator, recorded a picture of our cell with his cell phone, and created a fake video to fool their security system with the media editor. I might have claimed earlier that Shine doesn’t have any superpowers. I think I lied.

Once he was in, Shine also dumped the data he stole into Green Needle’s cell phone and my communicator to let us dig through their data to develop a plan. It turned out the reason Fusion Man couldn’t just blast his way out of our cell is that the Asyms coated every surface in the ship with a force field that they manipulated with the wands their carried around. When they wanted to shove us around, all they had to do was wrap us in fields extending from the walls and push. We also found their transportation method – galactic range spontaneous small wormhole generation. They didn’t have a ship over Earth; just a small scouting probe that could direct the wormholes. Getting home required getting through one of their wormholes which required getting past the force field which required dealing with the Asyms.

While Green Needle wading through the Asyms genetic history looking for ways to take them apart, I had Fusion Man make me stuff from the food they were feeding us. We started with a wand for the force fields, so we could get at the walls, so Fusion could make more equipment derived from the Technefarious equipment designs I keep in my communicator. By the time I had everything I wanted, Green Needle was ready to go, so we went. Having hacked through their defenses and found vulnerabilities in their wild genetic structure, we stomped across the ship, leaving havoc in our wake. After fighting our way through a six firefights, a dozen hostile fellow-abductees, and one fat mountain of happiness-inducing marmalade (I’d love to know the full story behind that one), we made our to the teleportation room. I ran the now hacked controls for the unit, sending everyone else through first and leaving something behind for the Asyms.

Back on Earth, Fusion expressed his admiration to me for my willingness to be last off of the Asyms’s ship. I responded that among the items I had him make for me back in the cell was a bomb strong enough to rip apart the spaceship even with all its force fields intact and that I’d stayed behind so I could arm it.

Fusion Man doesn’t like me very much.

Before he could decide if he really wanted to kill and before he remembered that he was supposed to be arresting me for the many, many crimes I’ve committed over the years, Green Needle hooked into Technefarious’s own teleportation systems and spirited us away.

That’s enough for now. It’s just good to be home.

Have a good week everyone.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

Frigid assures me that you’ve all been good little henchmen while I’ve been stranded on the far side of the universe, and frankly, that terrifies me.

To calm my nerves, I’ll fill you in on what I’ve been up to since my abduction by aliens.  Did I mention that it was Green Needle’s fault? The Asyms abducted her first. According to Shine, the Asyms are always born as not-twins, so they assume all other species must also come as a mismatched set. When they are asked Green Needle to identify her other half, she chose me. I said she should have chosen Rage Carnage, instead. She responded that she wanted someone who would help her back to Earth, not someone that would blow up the entire space ship. I told her that we would just have to see about that.  

Physically, the Asyms are notable for their variety of body shapes. They display very little in the way of symmetry, with mismatched limbs and organs stuck randomly along their body. Despite their mishmash of fish/mammal/reptile/insect/bird/tree/amoeba/non-Euclidean-monster-parts, they manage to move with a lethal grace. Apparently, their species has a staggering rate of mutations, fueled in part by their reproductive cycle. Shine claims that after the “egg” and “sperm” of a mated not-twin pair mix, the fertilized result scrambles the available genetic material and then splits into a new pair of not-twins. This happens by the trillions when they mate. Most combinations die immediately, and not-twins that lose their other half are quickly swarmed under by the complete not-twin pairs, resulting in a new horde of asymmetrical abominations every generation. Apparently, only their lifelong link to their not-twin and their reproductive cycle is the only things that breed true. Considering how many superpowers are the side effects of mutations on our planet, you can imagine the range of abilities they have as a species. It doesn’t seem particularly efficient way to go about it to me, but it’s a weird universe.

Impressed by the diversity they saw while observing Earth, they decided to take an extra sample of the local fauna besides Green Needle and myself. I’ve mention that Fusion Man was along for this trip in my last memo, which means that yes, the Shine I keep mentioning in this one is Shine Jackson: Action Blogger. Shine isn’t really a proper superhero, falling more into the Jimmy Olsen (Earth 1) or Rick Jones (Earth 616) spectrum of sidekick: no natural power set of his own, he still manages hang in with the heaviest of superhero adventures. Shine has had superpowers now and then, but nothing that stays with him all the time. Of course, his best friend is Fusion Man, who you can imagine was just delighted to see me as a fellow abductee. Actually, he assumed I was in league with the aliens, which isn’t surprising considering Technefarious had him imprisoned ourselves a few months ago. Shine and Green Needle managed to convince him otherwise, but it was kind of dicey there for a few minutes.

The Asyms watched our less-than-friendly scuffle without interfering, which is typical for them. Apparently, they spend their time trying to discover the ultimate evolution, a state they seem to think comes about by one organism destroying another. I’ve actually killed two not-twin pairs on this trip so far. They have the technology to corral us without making themselves vulnerable, but they’ll still expose themselves to us to see how we’ll react. Not being a superhero, I usually react by trying to whittle their numbers down. They’re tough enough but won’t normally come to the aid of someone who isn’t their not-twin. If I want to fight a pair, the Asym will let me, just to see if I will die. I don’t, and then they use their force fields to force back to whatever holding area they had us in that day.

My murders on this trip haven’t been limited to the Asyms. We’re not the only sample they’ve taken from the universe, and like kids putting insects in a glass jar, they’ll dump us together to see how we’ll react to the other aliens in the menagerie. That is how I got hurt last week. Bored by the fact that we four humans weren’t fighting among ourselves anymore, they added these two toxic radioactive piles of sludge. The goo took an immediate dislike to us, leaping to devour Shine as he recorded his impressions of our new roommates. Fusion Man, of course, leapt to his aid, but the sludges hit him with some sort of radiation burst that disoriented him (science department, please take note). My powers tipped me off that letting the piles devour Fusion would cause an unpleasant reaction to the local area, so I had to leap in, earning myself two goo-dissolved nubs of what use to be my hands, followed up by a mouth full of goo when I screamed. If Fusion Man hadn’t been still functioning well enough to fly me away from the fight, I would have been even more miserable than I was while my body parts regrew. While that was going on, Green Needle had been methodically cycling through her arsenal of poisoned needles in her gun, finally happening upon a combination that the sludge didn’t like.

The Asyms left us alone while Fusion Man and I recovered from the fight, but they’ve started mixing us with new roommates again. That’s a good thing. We four humans have been working on a plan.

Have a good week everyone. I’ll be home soon.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

Dictctor desk

Typng withh nose

No fingrs or tongue rght now

Green neeedle regrwng them but short posst for tody

Hurt savng fusion manns liife

Then he savd mine

He sayss merry xmass

Mor laate

Pho

The gonna killl aliens man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

As some of you may have already noticed, I’m not in my office today. This is not because I took an unscheduled vacation or a sick day. No, it’s because I was kidnapped by aliens. Oh sure, it happens to all of us. White light, strapped down, probe up the butt, but usually you wake up in your own bed in the morning.

Hang on one moment.

Green Needle tells me that doesn’t happen all that much, although she says she’s willing to help with my butt probe on this trip. I told her we would discuss that later, after we’ve settled the immediate issues at hand.

For example, as the leader of Technefarious, I’m going to order that our department heads assign some resources to find out where the heck I am. While Green Needle arranged to have me kidnapped with all with all my equipment, I don’t actually carry anything that lets me know where I am when I’m not on Earth. The split-photon signal we use in communicators is generally not blockable by technology means, so I’m reasonably confident this memo is going to be posted. I’m also told split-photons are not traceable, which means the science department won’t be able to just track my signal. I’m not sure we’re still in Earth orbit, so the occult department may have a tough time reaching me too. Get to work, people.

Hang on one moment.

Green Needle says I should have said, “where the hell I am” in the last paragraph, because I’m a supervillain. She also says my communicator looks suspiciously like a cell phone. I’m going to ignore her now.

I’m putting Frigid in charge while I’m gone. If you don’t like it, take it up with the Elite Triad. Remember everyone, if I don’t agree with any coups you carry out against my appointed replacement while I’m gone, I’ll kill you.

Sounds like the aliens are coming back now, so I’m going to hit post.

Have a good week everyone. And remember, the world is already ours – well, just yours right now, I guess. Keep it safe for me.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway  

The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator: 

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

Well, that was plan 1,782 for world domination into the recycling bin. Most of them never make it out of the planning stages, but this one actually looked like it might succeed for a few days.

Our initial plan (with the full title of PROJECT JELLY DOUGHNUT: GIANT EARTHQUAKES FROM SATTELITE BASED EARTHQUAKE MACHINES) worked well. All the resources were assembled with minimum losses on our part. The equipment built worked within expectations. Things did not fall apart until the implementation of the last part of the project, Operation Flat Pancake. The initial developments went well: the world knew we were demanding their capitulation, the earthquake machines worked well, and the Establishment was off balance. Delivering our message to the entire world at once undermined the public’s confidence in their governments, making the world’s nations more susceptible to our threats. The earthquake machines could focus sharply enough to target conventional military equipment. We proved that by picking off of several fighter jets in mid-flight while we were roughing up the armed forces of the more belligerent nations. Which just left the various unconventional forces of the Earth.

Considering how many millions of superpowered people we have on our planet, it’s surprising how few offensive superpowered units are part of any of the world’s standing armies. I suppose that’s partially influenced by superhero traditions that sprang up over the course of the last century, then reinforced by treaties worked out by the victors of World War II to set limits on the escalation of warfare fueled by superpowers. I know the Iron 56 incident in Germany near the end of the war scared both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. pretty badly. Even now, Earth acts as the home to at least fifteen beings that could destroy galaxies or entire universes. The idea of setting their patriotic planet killers against each other gave the world leaders pause, and the resulting treaties are thought to have prepped the ground for later treaties about nuclear weapons and other WMD’s. 

The Establishment, of course, doesn’t belong to any nation. Its Board of Directors is drawn from the global superhero population, theoretically making in neutral in international politics. This gives it the strength to coordinate the superpowered population for the Earth’s regular repulsion of extra-dimensional and extra-terrestrial attacks. By the same token, the Establishment rarely interferes with anyone’s domestic or international politics. So if we can ever convince the nations of the world to surrender, the Establishment is less likely to continue the fight. At the very least, it would shrink the pool of resources its leadership can draw from.

Of course, first you have to convince the nations of the world that the Establishment can’t come to their rescue. So they found our satellites pretty early in the first day but had trouble doing anything about them. Technefarious has decades of data about superpowers from which we developed defenses for the satellites to hold off the Establishment. According to our models, each could stand up to ten thousand years of attack. We actually hoped they would stand up to an average of about eight hours of abuse, because ours is a weird world, and there’s always some new power source popping up. Of course, we had three warehouses full of replacement satellites that we could teleport into orbit whenever one got destroyed. They kept the Establishment busy. So busy that it really unnerved the national governments that the Establishment could not just stop the earthquakes. Unfortunately, the Establishment could have kept popping our earthquake machines pretty much indefinitely, and their own bases are turned out to be mostly immune to the satellites. Our intelligence department chalks that up to all the oddball powers the Establishment has access to, so we had to take to fight directly to their leadership.

This is where things fell apart. Dealing with the Suit and his elite Executives is never easy, but it had to be done. While our assault teams conducted distraction attacks against the Establishment’s regular forces, I lead a direct assault against the Executives. I can’t give you a firsthand account of most of the fight. I targeted Suit himself, naturally enough. On paper, the man should only be a second tier hero, but his decades of experience leading the Establishment make him too dangerous to leave breathing. He used those decades of experience to take me off the board. I spend most of the battle trapped in a “dead room,” where Technefarious’s remote equipment could not reach me. I could have gotten out of that easily enough, but the Suit had dug up a guy called Grimmed.

I can kill anything. It’s my most notable superpower. What I can’t guarantee is that my victim will stay dead. Grimmed died a lot over the next few hours but was back and intact with seconds. When I tried to leave him just maimed, the little bastard killed himself. If Bleach had not eventually convinced Green Needle to have the Chlorophyll Cabal join our assault, I’m not entirely sure when I would have gotten out of there. Green Needle eventually tracked me down, and she solved my problem by hitting Grimmed with a paralyzing need, followed up with another shot that put him to sleep.

Despite my personal problems, we actually made a good accounting of ourselves. Technefarious left three Executives dead (although I’m sure they’ll be back among the living soon) and completely trashed their base. Unfortunately, by then it was a moot point.

The Executive Gearhead had managed to break away early in the fight to continue his research on the beams our satellites were emitting. While the Establishment’s base collapsed around him, he managed to develop a counter-field and deploy it. Within seconds of turning it on, our satellites became useless. The Establishment still hasn’t found everything we put in orbit, but with the heroes’ new ability to stop our earthquake machines with a flick of a switch, we’re going to have to file Project Jelly Doughnut in the failed plot drawer. 

Oddly enough, we suffered no deaths this week. Our base was never compromised, so the soul catchers and cloning equipment never went offline. I think this is the first time we’ve ever run the final operation of a project and none of our people died. It feels strange.

In any event, this memo is running long, so check the bulletin boards for this week’s events.

Have a good week everyone. And remember, the world is already ours – it just outfought us this time.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

The final stage of Project Jelly Doughnut, Operation Flat Pancake, is underway and going well so far! We started our morning by broadcasting our demand for the world governments to surrender their authority to us. Congratulations to our I.T. department for breaking into most major broadcast signals, cable networks, and web pages across the world. Only five percent of villain ultimatums get out to the public anymore. Most don’t make it past the communications infrastructure built up by the superhero community over the decades, ending up in the broadcast equivalent of a spam catcher. It gets watched. It’s just that only the superheroes, governments, and media see it live. Creating an impression upon the larger population is also one of the aims of these broadcasts, so getting through to the entire world is worthy of praise – and cash money. Expect bonuses in your next paycheck I.T. department.

Having delivered our terms (Dictatorship of the world for me, executive branch fiefdoms and money for interested Technefarious staff, parliamentary style world government to do the day to day governing because I plan to be a lazy but arbitrary dictator), we began with a show of force. Japan and western American have that nice earthquake resistant infrastructure, so we spend an hour testing our earthquake satellites by shaking them up, moving the center of the quake around and making them run far too long to prove that they had to be something other than natural. We followed up with targeted strikes on various military bases, giving them enough time to do some evacuating but cranking up the intensity before they had a chance to remove too much equipment from the sites. Enemy casualties have been light so far, but we are still trying to threaten them into submission rather than brutalizing them into it.

Unfortunately, we suffered our first casualty a little while ago. Henchman 43Q-F7 (Richard) died while fixing a broken fuse on one of our satellites. Our teleportation technology is discreet but not as undetectable as the cloaks we put on our satellites. Teleporting a small, space-suited person is harder to trace than a big clunky satellite, so we sent him out when it started having problems. Unfortunately, down on Earth, other events interfered with his repair. Gold Bug was taking advantage of the mess we are making to do some easy bank robbing. However, he ran into the Poker Hand while he was out. Due to an improbable series of events involving a hot dog cart, seven cheerleaders, and Gold Bugs oil expulsion spit attack, Wild Card slammed into Royal Flush while she was aiming an energy blast at the bank robber.  The unexpected impact caused Royal Flush to boost the energy level of her discharge and altered the angle so it shot up into the sky, hitting our satellite. For those unfamiliar with the Poker Hand, Wild Card’s power is unconscious probability manipulation, better known as luck: random, good for her, and bad for her enemies. In and of itself, the explosion would have just killed Henchman 43Q-F7. However, the satellite’s weird combination of magic and tech disrupted his connection to the soul catchers, so they were unable to gather him in as his soul left his body. The satellites have cloaks, but their explosions don’t, so now the Establishment knows where to look for our Earthquake machines. So Gold bug goes to jail, the Establishment has a lucky break, and poor Henchman 43Q-F7 is dead. There’s no justice in the world – which we already knew, or someone would have figured out how to kill me by now.

Next up, we’ll give the Establishment a chance to gather more data on our machines by targeting their facilities for a good shaking down. The next few hours should be interesting.

Have a good week everyone. And remember, the world is already ours – it just does not realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man