Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend, everyone.

With previous Technefarious leaders Dr. Crankpot and D.O.C.T.O.R. hanging around the home base again, it feels like old times. Unfortunately, those old times seemed to have extended into our operations. The list of dead from Project Bucket Run is longer than I want to include here. A permanent memorial I commissioned for them will be placed in the courtyard once it is complete.

Project Bucket Run was supposed to be a simple assault, steal, and retreat operation. Ruffle some feathers, do some property damage, take what we came for, and get out. Instead, after three days, only three of us survived.

We were just trying to steal the Bucket of Pure Water, a magical object that would be useful for some of our other projects. We had received a tip that it was among the horde of the dragon Metalhead. Our intelligence indicated that he was not a natural dragon, but one cursed into the shape of dragon by his excessive greed. Driven by their favorite vice, greed dragons are not noted for their excessive intelligence. Unlike the natural fire-breathers, their monomania can be used to trick or distract them during negotiations and battle. They don’t have much use for sacrificial virgins, but gold is something they really like.

We missed the fact that Metalhead wasn’t a normal victim of such a curse. He used to be a petty criminal. After an accident, most of his body was replaced by cybernetic parts, including three-fourths of his brain. It wasn’t our handiwork; we aren’t the only practitioners of superscience in the world. With his enhancements, his inorganic brain left Metalhead capable of plotting even after his dragon-cursed organic brain was crippled with greed.

He used that awareness to build himself one of the deadliest lairs I have ever been in, and my supervillain moniker is the Killing Man. Our initial penetration of his perimeter went smoothly. About halfway to his treasure trove, everything shifted. The after-action report from Extraction Teams A and B suggests that the lair itself teleported to another location. On the inside, our team suffered a sense of disorientation and then were attacked. Of course, between Frigid, Bleach, Elite Beta, Elite Gamma, the heavily armed Extraction Team C, and myself, we destroyed the laser turrets, giant robots, and miniature helicopters that jumped us. From there, we had just enough time to patch ourselves up and determine that our communicators weren’t working before we got attacked again. This time, our attackers were lava-spitting stone centipedes, gremlin cannons, and flying swords. Immediately after we finished with those came the poison ghosts, flaming zombies, and mobile ballista.

For seventy-two hours we fought. When we ran, acid pits, storms of explosive arrows, and crushing walls sprung up around us. When we stood our ground, wave after wave monsters and robots wielding every type of weapon and enchantment came at us.

Remember a couple of months ago how easily I penetrated the SuperMaxed prison they were keeping Bleach in? Well, those weaknesses existed because of the necessities of moving things in and out of the prison. Sustained by his curse, Metalhead could cover those gaps and create a setup to hammer any intruder into paste. Interlocking fields of magic and technology stopped our unblockable communication systems and cut us of from the Soul Catchers back at our home base. We didn’t realize the latter. The full cost of the mess we were in did not catch up to us until after we had finally conquered the facility.

I want to pause here to offer a special remembrance for Frigid. We lost her on the second day. Half of the Extraction Team were dead by that point, and Elite Beta had been reduced to his memory drive. The walls of the hanger we were crossing had turned into one giant heating element, dumping a punishing amount of radiation into us. Frigid’s endothermic powers blunted its effects but took far too much of her concentration. When the energy eagles dove into the room, she wasn’t able to avoid their claws. Injured, she reached out with her powers to a dangerous degree, drawing the radiation and the eagles to her like moths to a bug zapper. My powers tipped me off to what the end result of that would be. She wouldn’t let me stop her, and her command, Bleach suckered me with his powers and dragged me from the hanger. When we had reached a safer location he restored me, but it was too late to save her. In expressing my displeasure with the sequence of events, I may have gestured at Bleach too intently with a sharp implement, causing him to dash off into the next trap. We saved him, but I’ll admit that my reaction to Frigid’s death made that more complicated than it needed to be.

By the time we finally confronted Metalhead, only Bleach, one member of Extraction Team C (Rick), and myself remained. Compared to the effort it took to reach him, it wasn’t much of a fight. I had Bleach and Rick stash themselves safely and called upon our sadistic host myself. It wasn’t the first time I’ve gone dragon slaying.

The Bucket and the rest of Metalhead’s treasure are ours. So is his lair. If you ask me, though, we paid too high a price for a mere dragon’s horde.

At times like this, I like to remember that our real goal will put us in a position where we can keep this kind of thing from happening. Our fallen will not have died in vain.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man

From the Minds of the Three:

The Elite Triad here, again. Presumably, Dr. Callaway is still working on rescuing Bleach. Despite the length of time he’s been away, we did a message from him that said, “Fucking Brownian Motion.” We take this as an indication that he is still working on the mission to rescue Bleach. It’s that, or a speck of dirt got in his glass of water.

Have a good week, everyone. The data indicates we will eventually rule the world – the issue is moving the timetable up to a period where other people are still living on it.

Alpha, Beta, and Gamma
The Elite Triad

From the Minds of the Three:

The Elite Triad here. Dr. Callaway is unavailable to compose the weekly memo to our collective criminal enterprise. This was not unexpected, and he arranged with us to post one in his absence.

Primarily, our leader wanted to assure any spies or hackers reading this that he has not been around the facility since last week because he has been breaking Bleach out of prison. He also wanted us to stress that the previous statement may or may not be true. As if a hacker could get past our security measures to read this. Paranoid flesh person.

There are no fatalities to report this week. There was an accident with the hover tanks, but our soul catchers and cloning facilities efficiently rebuilt the pilots.

Unlike our leader, we’re not going mention any of the week’s extracurricular activities here. After all, if you can read this, you have access to that page. Dr. Callaway never includes the complete list in his memos, so we’re not sure why he bothers.

Have a good week, everyone. The data indicates we will eventually rule the world – the issue is moving the timetable up to a period where other people are still living on it.

Alpha, Beta, and Gamma
The Elite Triad

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.