Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Deposed:

Welcome back from your weekend, everyone.

This will be my last post as the leader of Technefarious. After the pounding we took from the Younglights last week, Dr. Crankpot and D.O.C.T.O.R. unified in their opposition to me. They arrived at an agreement to split the rule of our criminal enterprise between them and rallied much of the remnants of our much-battered personnel to their proposal.

Naturally, I offered to relieve them from the burden of their lives for their presumption.

Before our conversation could to escalate to the point of deploying killing implements, the Elite Triad intervened. While they had some reservations about the change, they were backing the coup de tat by our former leaders. When I asked the Elite what would happen if I pursued my preferred resolution, they informed me that would have to view that as dissolution of our friendship.

That stopped me. I guess I’ve just lost too many friends over the past few months to lose one more over a stupid argument.

Crankpot and D.O.C.T.O.R. were magnanimous in the victory and offered me a position in their new Technefarious. I declined. I took over Technefarious because we had a leader I couldn’t stand. I haven’t exactly warmed to our newly renewed leaders since they’ve rejoined us, either. If I’m not in charge, I’m going to have to go.

I’ll miss you all. Bleach actually offered to come with me, but then I told I wasn’t planning on paying him, so you’ll get to hang on to him for a while longer.

That’s it, I think. I just wanted to leave a record of what happened, and let everyone know there was nothing too hard about the feelings involved. Really, none at all by supervillain standards.

Remember to take care of each other. The world is already yours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Former Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man

Author’s Note: This is not the end of Photius’s adventures posted on Mondays. This is just a good point to switch formats. Over the past year, I’ve stretched the memo format as far as I want to and occasionally beyond. These posts were only supposed to be around 500 words, but it seemed like everyone second or third one ended up over 1000 as I tried to tell enough of the story to keep things moving along. I’m itchy to work with the other tools in my storytelling kit, but I’m not done Photius. So, his story continues. It will just be told a little differently from now on. I’ll see you next Monday.

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Well, it’s Monday, again. Yay.

We’re going to have to build a new Base Omega. Base Omega would be our backup base of last resort. Unfortunately, we’re standing in our current Base Omega right now, since the rest of our bases were blown up. Not our best week.

For those keeping score, we fought State, Overclocked, Hope Titanson, Silver Spear, Goldfish, Living Goo, and Hammerstone. Those would be a handful of the many members of the Younglights, the superteam Record Holder belonged to. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume their attack was in retaliation for my murder of him a while back. No one every said that a supervillain’s life is an easy one.

Our reconstruction of events is pretty patchy. We lost too many people and too much property to do a proper after-action report. We know State and Hope caused most of our problems. His moniker is the Quantum Android. She’s a goddess/reality TV star. Instead of a wacky television show, his reality distorting powers and her ability to make miracles created a storm of power that enclosed our headquarters and fritzed out much of our equipment.

Overclocked was responsible for the destruction of our soul catchers. With security distracted by the reality storm, it wasn’t hard for the robot to rip through our facility at superspeed, knocking out sensitive equipment as he went. The soul catchers were the very first thing he hit, but I don’t think they were trying to ensure our people would stay dead if killed. That’s not really been the level of violence the Younglights practice. I think it was aimed at me. If they were running an operation to avenge Record Holder, then it would make sense to cut off all avenues for my escape. The stories about our soul catchers have been making the rounds, but I think that the Younglights didn’t realize that not only was I not connected to the soul catchers, I can never use them myself. I guess the history behind my powers isn’t as widely known as I thought.

While that damned robot trashed our stuff, Silver Spear, Goldfish, Living Goo, and Hammerstone chewed their way through the base, neutralizing our staff as they went. I finally concluded that the heroes had pulled us far enough off balance that the loss of the base was inevitable, and I called for an evacuation.

That would have worked fine, except Hope and State’s reality storm didn’t like our teleportation signals. The first wave to teleport out didn’t die, thankfully. Instead, the storm anticipated their arrival point and blew up that location. That’s how we lost our first backup base. It was a pretty big boom. Our teleportation system detected the newly created obstruction at the location and immediately routed them to the next emergency point. That’s how we lost our second backup base. The Teleportation system switched to the next and the next and the next, and then we were all out bases.

That’s excepting Base Omega. For paranoia’s sake, you cannot teleport to it. Turns out that is a handy feature for just this kind of screw up.

With our evacuation options reduced to escape by vehicles, it was clear that someone was going to have to stall the Younglights while everyone else scattered. So, I gathered up Bleach and the Elite Triad and headed out to do just that. To my surprise, Dr. Crankpot joined us. As old as he is, I wasn’t really expecting to want to mix it up with people four or five generations younger than himself. While we attended to that, I assigned D.O.C.T.O.R. to coordinate the evacuation. With everything else screwed up, his big AI brain was in the best position to maximize Technefarious’s flight.

The Younglights are good fighters. I have to give them that. None of the killing scenarios for them that I envisioned during our brawl were easy to implement. I’d get the upper hand over one of them, and one of the others would intervene. The flipside was that they couldn’t take us, either. The Elite’s capability in the fight wasn’t a surprise to me, but Dr. Crankpot’s was. The dude can scrap. Sure, he couldn’t match the Younglights in speed or power, but he had an endless stream of knick-knacks and gadgets to screw with them.

All of that was just a cover for Bleach. Hope and State’s reality storm was keeping our vehicles penned into our base, so they needed to be taken out. With their teammates occupied by us, Bleach could get close enough to them to drain their powers down enough to break to the storm.

The end of the storm meant our people could escape. It also meant that our equipment could hook back into our satellite network. D.O.C.T.O.R. analyzed the restored data stream and informed me that the reality storm had not gone unnoticed by the larger superhero community. The Establishment was dispatching the Executives to deal with the matter.

Their arrival would likely not go well for us, so we beat down the Younglights enough that we could disengage and ran. D.O.C.T.O.R. had held a drill sled for us. As we plunged into the Earth, he informed us that the Establishment had arrived. From there, it was every vehicle crew for themselves.

Only one-third of Technefarious arrived at Base Omega. I’m sure some of the missing are just lying low, and that others have decided this would be a good time to desert our organization. Worse, some died in the attack. There’s simply no way to prevent it in an assault that thorough, no matter how good the superheroes are at their job. The remainder (probably the majority) of the missing are probably sitting in jail cell or in a hospital, waiting for the local authorities to attend to them. Now we need to figure out how to rebuild and how to recover our people.

This is a setback, but the world will be ours. 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.

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 Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend, everyone.

Elite, print this out for the ancient bastard so he can read it. CRANKPOT, YOU ARE NOT IN CHARGE OF TECHNEFARIOUS. I killed my immediate predecessor to get the job. I’ve killed plenty of uppity henchmen to keep it. If you don’t believe me, let me remind you of the conversation we had to get you submit to testing. I haven’t lost any upper body strength in the past week, so I can dangle you out a window again if I need to.

Speaking of Dr. Crankpot, founder of Technefarious and pain in my ass, we’re still not sure why he is alive. I set Crankpot up with a lab and made Elite his assistant, but I also insisted he submit to every poke, prod, and pie-eating contest that the science and occult departments could think to put him through. Our current Crankpot is not a robot or a clone or a homunculus or an evil twin from another dimension or a good triplet from an alternate timeline. There are holes in his memory when compared to the historical record, especially concerning the final days of his life. Aside from that last bit, the memory distortion is perfectly normal for a human. The missing memories from those final days suggest that he may be time-jumped from shortly before he died. They also suggest that his body may have been resurrected or rebuilt from when he apparently died, and the damage from coming back cost him some memories. It is possible that that this is his original body, since his death was one of those lost in an explosion deals. We’re still working on it, but it looks like he might be himself, rather than some sort of trap by the Establishment.

Also missing from Crankpot’s memory is why he was in prison. No one of has any doubt that he deserved to be there. The question is what mix of courts and bureaucracy ended up with putting him in Bleach’s cell. The computer department is still trying to trace that information.

Until we have that history, Elite Triad will just have to keep Crankpot under control, or we may find out how well he bounces after a long fall from a window.

With everything that’s been going on, it’s been a while since I mentioned our ongoing war of nonsense packages with the Golden Web. The last thing they sent us was a box full of pirated superhero action figures from China. In retaliation for their shipment of excess lead and trademark infringements, I’m sending them half of a prop rifle from the Pilot Sunrise movies. It’s actual movie memorabilia, but only half of it survived an energetic encounter I had with Razor Lady. If my paramour Green Needle happens to be reading this, let me assure you that it happened long before we hooked up. For the rest of you, I’ll try to be more vigilant in keeping you up with these things. I mean the exchanges with the Golden Web, not my sexual activities. Those two things haven’t intersected yet.

In honor of our recovering Dr. Crankpot, the propaganda department is screening the classic documentary: Technefarious: Triumphs Through The Decades. It will be shown in Auditorium A on Wednesday night. Friday night is the annual Barbeque Blowout, so bring your families for an evening of food and fun. I’ll be cooking the hot dogs.

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.

Right. Sorry about being gone for the past two week. It takes forever to get around when you’re the size of a molecule and flying the Brownian motion.

I should probably explain that. I was away on a mission to break Bleach out of jail. He was being kept in one of those SuperMaxed brand prisons set up to hold supervillains. Considering what they have to contain, they do a pretty good job keeping people in. None of them are perfect, though. After all, things have to be able to get into a prison everyday: guards, lawyers, new prisoners, food, supplies, air, light, gravity, quantum forces. Add in a world with superpowers, and you can see the kinds of problems they might have keeping things out.

Newer henchmen may wonder why Bleach didn’t kill himself and allow our soul catchers to extract him from his captivity. The answer to that is that we don’t want to encourage the Establishment to build something that will stop Technefarious souls from being caught by our equipment. They don’t have one yet, and I don’t see any point in putting them in a position of needing to accelerate their countermeasures.

The countermeasures they do have are enough to make a jailbreak interesting. They can’t use everything they have. For example, the K1 anti-teleportation field interferes with the EverSee anti-cloak field. It’s not anything dangerous, but it turns everything in the overlapping fields pink. Which countermeasures they use on their prisons is highly classified information that could only be uncovered by a massive intelligence operation orchestrated by a sophisticated long-term enterprise. Luckily, Technefarious is just that kind of organization.

This time, we decided getting small was the best way to break into the prison with all the stuff we were going to need to break out. So, our science department shrunk me and my equipment – wow, that sounds dirty now that I’ve typed it. They shrunk me and snuck me into the home of a member of the prison’s staff so I could hitch a ride on their clothes when they went to work. I won’t reveal which person unintentionally smuggled me into the prison, but I will say that the warden keeps a very tidy closet.

The frisking scans that everyone entering the prison is subjected to did not detect me. Between my microscopic nature and the cloaks we had on my equipment to hide their energy signatures, there wasn’t much that they could have picked up.

From there, I began my epic journey through the prison to locate Bleach’s cell. That sucked. I couldn’t move faster than the air around me. A power expenditure strong enough to get me anywhere in a reasonable amount of time would be detected by the passive energy scans that blanket the prison and trigger the alarms. I also didn’t know exactly where Bleach was being held in the facility. Technefarious hadn’t had a chance to hack that information yet, so I spend most of my time floating around, trying to locate him. Not fun.

Finally, I found him. They had him in the general population cells, which surprised me. Power drainers like Bleach aren’t the deadliest people in the world, but I still figured he’d have been placed somewhere in special security. He even had a cellmate in his cell. Those two bits of information are called foreshadowing.

I sent a signal to Technefarious to mobilize the rest of the operation, dropped the cloak off my equipment, and inflated myself back to full size (Here, I would like to apologize for not finding a way to make “mobilizing the rest of the operation” sound dirty, too). Alarms went off. Bleach and his cellmate were surprised. Suppression fields dropped down to stymie the launch of the equipment I brought for the rescue. Suppression fields we already knew about because they’re part of the prison’s countermeasures – countermeasures that have known interference problems. Known problems generated by the equipment I brought with me and triggered when I dropped the cloak. Now the cell was filled with a squeal that made my incisors shimmy, an inadvisable level of ozone, and a distortion that made my vision look like I was peering through a fish-eyed lens, but all the rest of the equipment I brought would still work.

I started to fill Bleach in on what the next few steps would be, but then he collapsed. They had placed him in the general population because they had jammed subdermal implants into him to keep him under control. With that future shadow behind me, the other tried to get my attention with a vigorous shake of my shoulders.

Here’s a tip, kids. When dealing with an armed supervillain occupied with busting his buddy out of jail, it’s probably best to try to avoid the appearance of attacking them in any way, shape, or form. It cost the cellmate the top of his left ear, mostly to keep him from bugging me again than any real concern I had about an attack from him. However, turning to look at him to make sure I didn’t stick him in the eye during the strike did mean I got to get a good look at his face.

He was Dr. Crankpot, founder of Technefarious and known to be dead for over three decades now.

At that point, he started screaming at me about who he was, how important he was, and how powerful his organization Technefarious was. I cut him off (verbally this time), informed that I had been in charge of Technefarious for years at this point, and that I did not answer to him. Then I grabbed him by the front of his shirt, squatted downed to pick up Bleach, activated my flight suit, and blasted my way through the walls of the prison.

Dodging bullets, heart-pounding action, blah blah blah.  I flew away and met a Technefarious extraction team that had set up a couple miles away when I sent the signal at the start of the exciting part of the jailbreak. While our medical staff removed the tracers and other equipment jammed into our jailbirds, I coordinated the repulsion of the prison’s pursuit.

Then we all teleported home.

The End.

Oh, if you see Dr. Crankpot in the halls, he isn’t your boss, so you don’t have to do what he says. I’ve assigned the Elite Triad to keep an eye on him while we sort him out.

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 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