Entries tagged with “Dr. Occultomancer”.
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Mon 12 Sep 2011
From the Desk of the Dictator:
Welcome back from your weekend, everyone.
There was no post from last week, because our computer network was preoccupied installing some software. With our computers down, we put off Project Bucket Run. We’ll resume trying to steal the Bucket of Pure Water later this week.
The software that took over our system originated from the hard drive the Golden Web delivered two weeks ago. Our rivals certainly know our weakness. Give us a nice black box, and Technefarious will start playing it to see what makes it work. If the world ends because of it? “Oops.â€
I can’t fault our computer department for the problem. They hooked up the hard drive to a computer that was not tied into our network. The hard drive immediately hijacked the machine, and the computer department patted themselves on the back for their caution. Unfortunately, the computer was plugged into the wall to power it. No computer can send signals across the power cord. Certainly not without adding some special hardware to the computers sending and receiving the information. There’s no way a regular machine could do that on its own.
Some of the older Technefarious personnel may recognize the problem with that assessment, because we do know a computer that could do exactly that. Technefarious built it. In fact, our recently not-dead-and-still-agitating-to-be-put-back-in-charge founder Dr. Crankpot oversaw the compiling of its code as part of Project Delta AI. It is, of course, Technefarious’s second most famous leader, D.O.C.T.O.R.
It was D.O.C.T.O.R.’s children, the Elite Triad who first figured out what was going on. With the network under assault, they assisted in the counterattack and recognized that the details of the attack strongly resembled the restoration of D.O.C.T.O.R. from one of his backups. When they reported that to me, I ordered a stop to our attempts to disrupt it. As people of science, sometimes you just have to see how things turn out with knowing all the end ahead of time.
And now I have two of my previously deceased predecessors demanding to be reinstated as the head of Technefarious. That’s gratitude for you.
Oddly enough, my first job with Technefarious was to kill D.O.C.T.O.R. after he was already dead. Dr. Occultomancer was in charge at that point, and he told me he was hiring me to ensure that D.O.C.T.O.R. would not be able to reclaim his control over the organization. He was lying. He had somehow discovered how my powers worked and was using my ability to determine how to kill anything to ferret out any lost backups there were of D.O.C.T.O.R. I had to go back to Occultomancer and tell him I would not be able to fulfill the contract since I could not find any. He said he was sorry to hear that, and then explained his real aim was to recover D.O.C.T.O.R. The AI had fallen to Queen Quantum in an attack that had obliterated every copy of him in this universe and time-hardened the destruction to make it nearly impossible to recover him using time-travel. Occultomancer was looking for a way around the issue and had hoped I was that loophole.
Looks like someone else may have found the gap in reality needed to bring D.O.C.T.O.R. back. I wonder who it was?
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
Mon 18 Jul 2011
From the Desk of the Dictator:
Welcome back from your weekend, everyone.
If you see a man in a Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops wandering around the base today, feel free to ignore him. That will be Aluian, the only one of Lucifer’s soldiers to be readmitted to the hosts of Heaven and my guardian angel. Try not to let him disrupt your routine, but be polite to him. Actually, you can be as rude as you like, although I do recommend not trying to kill him. While I assure you it can be done, destroying a veteran of Hell and Heaven is probably going to annoy somebody. Consider carefully if you want that kind of attention. Not that I would object if you did.
I’m not entirely sure how Aluian got assigned to me. I suspect he may have chosen me on his own, since he doesn’t seem especially dedicated to taking orders. Technically, he serves the One God, a.k.a. God a.k.a. Allah a.k.a. Yahweh. I know much of Technefarious staff is drawn from occidental countries, so I should probably explain that angels have never been exclusively His servants. Before the rise of Christianity and Islam spread His worship beyond the Jews, records exist of the winged servants of the Babylonian gods. Even now, some angels can be found in the service of the many Little Gods of our world. As servants of the One God, His angels have their own internal politics that reflect their disagreements about how mercy, hope, help, and punishment should be meted out.
Aluian doesn’t seem to answer to any of the major factions of angels serving the One God. He also doesn’t do a great job appealing to my better nature, but that may be more my fault than his. The long gaps between our visits are definitely his fault, though. The last time he bugged me was before I had taken over Technefarious but after Dr. Occultomancer had died. That time, he showed up just before I killed a henchman from the occult department who had crossed me. Aluian appeared out of nowhere and demanded that I hold my strike. So I killed the henchman and asked Aluain what was so important about him that I shouldn’t have done that. Turned out that Aluain was more concerned about how killing people was affecting me. That was nice of him, I suppose. But I’d been doing it for a couple of decades by then, and I hadn’t noticed any recent changes.
This time, he just dropped in to catch up. He wanted to see what kind of operation I was running, so that’s why he is wandering around. Technically, he’s a security threat, but he works for people who have their own ways to find out anything sensitive he might stumble across. Ignore him, and he’ll eventually go away on his own.
We’ll be breaking Bleach out of prison this week, so expect the briefing for the mission to be scheduled soon. If any spies working for the good guys are reading these memos, passing that information along to the Establishment for us would make our rescue attempt that much easier. Or will it? Have you guessing now, don’t I? Maybe we aren’t going to rescue Bleach this week. Maybe we aren’t going to help him at all! He does owe me twenty dollars for losing a bet on a Cub’s game.
In Auditorium A tonight, the propaganda department is premiering Film Machine’s documentary: Doctor Crankpot, D.O.C.T.O.R., Technefarious, and you. It’s a history of Technefarious down through the decades. I told Film that his title makes it sound like a puberty film for cyborgs, but he only liked it more after that. Enjoy it anyway. I’ve already seen it, and it’s good.
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
Tags: Allah, Aluian, angels, Bleach, Christianity, D.O.C.T.O.R., Dr. Crankpot, Dr. Occultomancer, Establishment, Flim Machine, God, guardian angel, Heaven, Hell, Islam, Judaism, Little Gods, Lucifer, the One God, Yahweh
Mon 27 Jun 2011
From the Desk of the Dictator:
I know I gave his eulogy a few days ago, but I want to spend a bit more time remembering Saber-Cat here.
When I first joined Technefarious, Saber-Cat spent six weeks trying to kill me.
At this point, I’ve been associated with our criminal enterprise long enough that people think of me more as The Killing Man: That Guy From Technefarious than anything else. Back then, I still best known for killing the Titanium Android. Not constrained by the limitations of merely biological body, the Titanium Android relentlessly patrolled the Earth, saving lives of every sort. He was so dedicated to preserving life that he declined to kill those villains he fought that the rest of the world would dispose of in a flat second.
Saber-Cat had fought the Titanium Android three times over the years. Twice, he fought the Android to a standstill and then escaped. The third time ended with a short stint in prison for Saber, which Technefarious extracted him from.
Despite his association with us, Saber-Cat was not so much of a criminal as an immortal furry man with a Sabertooth tiger’s head whose ancient sense of morality is out of step with the modern world. The illegality of jaywalking made no sense to him, and the concept of sitting through a red light when no one was else was coming struck him as insane. His willingness to fight and disdain for the finer points of modern bureaucracy made Technefarious a good fit for him, but he was certainly capable of appreciating the good that Titanium Android did for the world.
As such, he was less than appreciative of the invitation Dr. Occultomancer made to the superhero’s killer to join Technefarious’s ranks. Saber wasn’t able to talk Occult into rescinding his offer, so the big cat-man decided to address his discomfort with the situation by killing me. He was perfectly aboveboard with intentions, challenging me to a duel to the death. I declined, since I didn’t feel any particular need to kill him. He persisted, so I negotiated a different set of terms. We would fight. If he surrendered, I could stay. If I surrendered, I would have to leave. If one of us happened to die during the fight, so be it.
We met that evening in one of the Technefarious’s gyms, before an audience made up mostly of Saber’s friends on the staff. Dr. Occultomancer tried to talk us out of it, but neither Saber-Cat nor I are exactly slavish in obeying orders. After Occult retired to his seat in annoyance, Saber-Cat and I faced off. Saber was armed with that magic saber he loved so much, while I brought in a sword so I had a blade to match against his. It was just a regular sword and perfectly incapable of killing the furry idiot, which I confirmed every night for six weeks by maiming him to the point where he couldn’t actually continue the fight. He got stabbed through the heart, had his eyes ripped out, and limbs severed. My favorite evening was the one where I decapitated him and he spent fifteen minutes cursing at me until his tongue got too dry to speak clearly anymore. He still refused to surrender though. He was immortal and saw no reason the temporary inconvenience of a lack of body parts to declare the fight over.
I’m underselling Saber-Cat’s fighting skills with that last paragraph. He had millennia of combat experience under his belt and none of our fights lasted less than an hour. I just happen to be really, really dangerous myself. After it was clear that a single round wasn’t going to resolve the issue, Dr. Occultomancer declared that we could only continue our fight after the workday. For six weeks, we were the star event of Technefarious’s evenings. Saber couldn’t beat me, and I refused to walk away.
The last night, I waited patiently across our battlefield from Saber-Cat for sixty minutes. He stood the entire time with his resting on the hilt of his saber, its tip dug into the ground, watching me through slitted eyelids. At the end of that hour, he placed his blade on the ground, then walked over and knelt before me. That was the last time we crossed swords.
Well, with actual swords anyway. He never hesitated to tell me off when he thought I was wrong, even after I took over Technefarious.
Our occult department tells me they think there was some sort of magical interference with our attempt to rescue him after the failure of Operation Carved Branch. When possible, the Establishment likes to teleport its superpowered prisoners when it needs to move them from one place to another. There have been so many escapes and rescues during transit when their prisoners are moved the regular way that the expense of teleportation is worth it when the superpowers involved don’t make it too risky. The interruption of the power containment they have to use on Frigid and Bleach if they were teleported means they will have to be moved over land. Saber-Cat, with his purely physical powers, was a perfect candidate for teleporting. Technefarious has been sitting on a scheme to intercept an Establishment teleportation signal for some time now, and this seemed like a reasonable time to tip our hand on that. The worst that our attempt should have resulted in was causing enough interference to bounce him back to his original teleportation pad. Instead, our attempt to steal the signal scattered him across half the world.
When our science department reported that, I knew he was dead this time, just like I knew my sword couldn’t kill him back when I fought him. Because of his powers, we could never hook him into our soul catchers, but I had our occult department try to retrieve him anyways. They could only confirm that his soul had indeed passed to the other side.
Goodbye, Saber-Cat. You will be missed.
Your Leader,
Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man
Mon 21 Mar 2011
From the Desk of the Dictator:
Welcome back from your weekend everyone.
We’re running Operation Cloudburst as I write this. This is the final stage of Project Cut Flowers, where Pipewrench pursues his revenge against his fellow countrymen of the Suncloud by firing his Dimension Projector at their sky-flying island. We didn’t dig too much into the reasons he wants revenge, but he is a villain and this is his response, so I’m guessing it isn’t actually proportional to severity of the harm he received.
Pipewrench is giving the orders to the Technefarious personnel onboard his skyship while I act as the admiral to his captain. As an admiral with only one ship, I’m mostly tracking reports and waiting for my special talents to be needed. So far I’ve plenty of time to type this and have a nice cup of tea.
We got pretty close before we were detected. The invisibility mist cloaking our skyship worked flawlessly right until one of the natives of the Suncloud out on a Sunday flight slammed into us. Unfortunately, she was the fairly sturdy sort, so the collision didn’t knock her out of the sky, nor did the gunfire from our machine/laser/plasma guns.
Our craft is a fairly ugly thing if you could actually see it. It’s basically a big floating platform the size of three warehouses with the Dimension Projector and defensive structures strapped to it. It’s not pretty and takes more people to run than it would have otherwise, but we were hurrying to get this done with. Throw in the Assault teams on board to repel borders, and it’s pretty crowded. We’re basically going to have to moor ourselves to the Suncloud to ensure the Dimension Projector catches it all, so it’s not like we could leave them behind. Teleporting everyone out if something happens to our skyship could get dicey. Good thing we have all those Transportation teams standing by, isn’t it?
Initial contact with the Suncloud’s defenses was fun. They couldn’t see us, so they covered our part of the sky with flak. Theoretically, it either should have hit us or revealed our location by the lack of explosions. Except our force fields shrugged off their shots, and our magicians cast illusions of fake explosions to match the rest of the sky. I’m so glad Dr. Occultomancer built a decent Occult department for Technefarious before I took over.
It’s been easier for the Suncloud’s forces to find us since we’ve made physical contact with the island. Their laser-shooting spider automatons were pretty much useless. Lasers go right through invisible things. We probably would have ignored them, but they started coming onto our skyship. Pipewrench had the Assault teams use them for target practice, which attracted the attention of the Suncloud’s catapults. Catapults are not something I would normally consider a threat, but they’re using grey-goo nanobot shots sheathed in a counter-force field field. Remind me to have the science department steal the latter technology and come up with a better name for it. The goo eats about two feet of material before it burns out. It’s been messy, but with their personal force fields only direct hits are dangerous to our personnel. If the Suncloud keeps it up for much longer, the entire front deck will nothing but dead goo, which the Assault teams are already starting to shovel into foxholes. Remember kids, don’t fire weapons at your enemies that they can build a defense out of.
The human troops from the Suncloud are beginning to assemble behind the automatons now. I expect we’ll see them in direct combat soon.
And there’s a matter that requires my personal attention. Hitting send!
Your Leader,
Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man
Tags: assault teams, counter-force field field, Dimension Projector, Dr. Occultomancer, grey-goo nanobot shots, invisibility mist, laser-shooting spider automatons, occult department, Operation Cloudburst, Pipewrench, Project Cut Flowers, Science Department, skyship, Suncloud, Transportation teams