Primate Typings

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.

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

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

The Fogurols invaded lasted week. They are aliens bent on conquering the Earth, requiring the superheroes and supervillains to band together drive them off, blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, there are always a few casualties from this sort of thing. This time, the vigilante Pinnacle numbered among our dead.

“But wait,” you say, “wasn’t killing Pinnacle the focus of Project King of the Mountain? Are you trying to tell me they succeeded where our illustrious leader failed?”

First of all, “illustrious?” Suck up.

Second of all, no, I just want the rest of the world to think Pinnacle died during the latest world crisis, which was the plan all along. Considering his connections to the Board of Directors for the Establishment, it was safer for Technefarious if their attention wasn’t focused on wiping me out. I added enough trouble for us by killing Record Holder during my little safari.

So, having pissed off Pinnacle to the point where he would follow me into a trap to get at me, I then had to wait for a worldwide event to distract from our little fight. Those little dustups happen every couple of months on our Earth, so I didn’t expect to be holed up in my cave for too long.

Did I mention the trap was in a cave? Originally enchanted to hold the Thunder Beast’s Shadow long before humans tamed fire, Technefarious annexed the underground prison after the Shadow escaped in the 1960’s. We’ve augmented it over the years with psionic baffles and entropy stabilizers, creating a battleground that nullifies 99% of superpowers. It doesn’t work on me. My physical powers are expressed in my muscles and bones, and fields that cut off external power sources don’t affect those. The insights I get on how to kill anything are trickier to trace, but I’ve never found anything that can block them either.

Interestingly enough, all the power drainers we had at work were not perfectly suited to stripping Pinnacle of his powers either. Even within the cave, my special insights suggested scenarios that would require widely divergent responses on my part to finally bring him down. Frustratingly, my powers were vague on exactly what acts he could perform that wouldn’t be stopped by our fields. Superpowers are just a giant game of rock, paper, scissors sometimes.

Still, the dampening hampered him. That slick power armor he uses to enhance his strength and speed had to come off. As for his famed gadgets and utilities, the fields stripped away their battery power, turning half of them into so much junk. Sure, he still had his smoke bombs, submission sprays, and low ignition chemicals available, but it as a fair fight. After all, I had a knife.

Our battle lasted two hours and six minutes. I suffered seven broken bones, lost three teeth, and had my left ring finger cut off second knuckle. The knife I started with changed hands five times. I was glad when the fight finally finished, because by the end I really, really needed to pee.

After I patched myself up, I dressed Pinnacle in his armor, damaged it to match the injuries he had received during our fight, and then dumped his body in one of the battle sites with the Fogurols. The Establishment will find him there and assume he fell defending the planet. They’ll figure out the truth eventually, I’m sure, but by then, something else will have come along to distract most of the world’s superheroes from what I’d done.

Let’s hope that distraction is our successful enforcement of our rule over the world.

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.

This week, I kicked off Project King of the Mountain in which I will kill the superhero Pinnacle. Except for my immediate support staff, most of you won’t notice any changes in your usual routines during this project. Frankly, the times I would need to use all of Technefarious to kill one person are few and far between and would usually involve enemies foretold by things like the sky burning or a plague of frogs.

My presence at our home base will spotty for a while. For this project, I’ll be spending most of my hours in Pinnacle’s hometown of Lowplain. Ideally, this assignment would consist of a single strike against the urban vigilante himself. Unfortunately, despite a career spanning decades, no one knows who Pinnacle is. Careful computer analysis of the historical records suggests that this isn’t always the case, but the knowledge of his identity gets purged from our world shortly after his exposure. It is unclear if this is due to magic or some other sort of reality distortion source. We’ve been unable to pry his identity loose using our own tools from those fields since we’ve became aware of his interest in Technefarious, so we’re having to go after him using the roundabout methods of my own “kill anything” powers.

Whatever the full nature of the Pinnacle’s powers, everyone agrees that his combat abilities are those of a highly trained human with access to exotic technology and magic. That I can handle. The hard part is going to be getting him to face me alone. With the death of his spy, I don’t think there’s much way to hide that I’m going to come after him. The problem then becomes how I do I draw him out without him bringing along half of the Establishment with him. Push comes to shove, I could probably still kill him if he did, but I’d like to avoid the war with the Establishment that would kick off.

So, I’m in Lowplain this week. I may not know how to find Pinnacle, but I do know how to get a message to him. Lowplain is notorious for its organized crime, despite Pinnacle’s efforts. The city acts as a gateway to too many locations to stem the tide of illegal goods flowing through it for long. Every time Pinnacle and local law enforcement drives one set of goons under, another set immediately takes their place. I’ve spent the last couple of days entertaining myself by locating dumps of illegal goods and dens of vice. Once I find them, I make it a point to kill the onsite management and most of the armed guards. I leave a few alive and let them know that I’m looking for Pinnacle. I’m sure it will get back to him pretty quickly.

I suppose I could have just highjacked the local airwaves and done the same thing, but I’d like to do this without upsetting the civilian population too much. Our propaganda department tells me that when regular people find out that the killer of the Titanium Android is hunting someone, it tends to upset them. Civilians are much more comfortable when they just think of me as the current leader of Technefarious. After all, Technefarious has failed to properly enforce its rule on the world for decades. As the Killing Man, however, I assassinated the world’s greatest hero.

I’m a bit jealous of those you back at home base this week. The science department has updated the live action Portal course with the new content from Portal 2, so those of you who want to replicate the new game in the real world should have a blast. Please, no more requests to have the lethal threats in the game be made just as deadly in the course. That’s not why I built the Soul Catchers. Besides, the janitorial staff doesn’t want have to clean up corpse after corpse just for your amusement.

Finally, while I was off terrorizing the criminals of Lowplain, I had Frigid arrange our next shipment in the nonsensical gift exchange with our enemies at the Golden Web. I’m curious to see how they’ll react to receiving five semis full of ping-pong balls.

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.

According to the Establishment’s Emergency Alert, the monsters currently attacking the Technefarious facility are dragons, although I don’t remember dragons usually being described as having lush grass-green beards. The ones gnawing on our buildings are a small portion of an invasion from another dimension. Our Intelligence department has reviewed the chatter about the attack around the Earth and estimated the threat level at a Global C. Since the people of this planet don’t properly acknowledge our claim to rule them, we’ll let their superhero community deal with the bigger problem.

Staff not assisting in harassing the local infestation should stay indoors and away from windows. I’m typing this right now because Saber-Cat told me off for interfering with his overseeing the defenses. Because of my powers, I do know how to kill the dragons, but since the first step would be to send them back to their own dimensions, I wasn’t especially useful to him. Rather than hurt his feelings, I checked in with the other department heads and used my powers to narrow down the avenues of research for the Occult and Science departments. Still, they can do the work faster than I can, so I came back to my office to twiddle my thumbs.

They’ll probably call me if they need me.

Try not get eaten, people. Your clones aren’t cheap you know.

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.

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

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

As you have all noticed, we’re delaying our attack for another week. I have a cold, and I’ll be damned I’m going to get into a fight with every nation in the world and the Establishment while I’m under the weather. Actually, I have it on good authority that I’m already damned, but I still hate fighting when I’m wearing my fuzzy bunny slippers. They’re made from real bunnies, you know.

Did you also know that Dr. Adam Numeral (a.k.a. The Atomic Number) actually invented a cure for the common cold back in the 1950’s? Unfortunately, its creation coincided with the Livid Plague’s manufacture of a virulent, mutation-prone, and deadly super-cold. The Atomic Number managed to dilute Livid’s virus with his cure, but all it did was reduce the severity of the symptoms. Today, the regular cold virus is dead and all the colds people get are actually created by the weakened super-cold bug. If I’m every time traveling to that era, someone remind me to kill the Livid Plague.

We’ll be running with minimum staffing this week to keep the bug from spreading throughout our organization and forcing us to delay the attack another week. Check in with your shift supervisors to determine what your hours are.

Have a good week everyone. And remember, the world is already ours – we’re just taking the week off from our duties.

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man