Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend, everyone.

I suppose I could have taken down Dr. Crankpot’s post from last week, but I’m leaving it up. I think it puts Crankpot’s deficiencies as a leader on display. He’s certainly technically competent, but he hardly shows the temperament of a leader of men, women, robots, and tendril creatures that live in our plumbing.

Shenanigans from the previously deceased former leaders of Technefarious aside, it’s time we implemented another project. Project Bucket Run will consist of two operations performed by Extraction Team C with Extraction Teams A and B serving as backup. Our goal is to steal the Bucket of Pure Water.

The bucket was an ancient attempt to develop a Philosopher Stone. Unlike a proper Philosopher Stone, it cannot create an elixir that extends the drinker’s life. Instead, any liquid poured into the bucket, no matter how foul, will turn into purified (i.e. distilled) water. Not the most earth-shattering power in the world, but it is uniquely suited to fit several of our ongoing needs. Distilled water is used extensively by the science department for chemistry and the occult department for alchemy. Those two departments also produce an impressive amount of hazardous waste that I would prefer to not just leave lying around. No sense in conquering the world if it is a giant dumpsite. Finally, we have at least one world-conquering project that involves an exceptional amount of distilled water, so having the Bucket of Pure Water would be useful that, too.

The bucket also turns lead into gold like a Philosopher Stone, but at a rate of one nugget a month, it’s easier to dig if you want gold that badly.

And yes, a Philosopher Stone does sound like it has the powers of a certain stone of sorcery. That would be because that’s what it actually was. It was rebranded in the American market, because philosopher didn’t sound actiony enough for the bloody Yanks.

There was a decent turnaround on our package exchange with the Golden Web this time. They just sent us a simple external hard drive with some sort of encrypted data on it. The computer department is trying to figure out exactly what is in there.

There was a decent turnaround on our package exchange with the Golden Web this time. They just sent us a simple external hard drive with some sort of encrypted data on it. The computer department is trying to figure out exactly what is in there.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

After I killed his old sidekick Record Holder last week, Pinnacle finally decided to send someone to hunt me down. Something, anyway. I’m still not sure if it was a person or not.

The hero of Lowplain decided to begin by delivering a message to me by hacking into our computer network. Our firewall would have normally just blocked the attack, except it happened to come encrypted with D.O.C.T.O.R.’s personal communication codes. Naturally, the Elite Triad likes to keep an eye out for their creator, so it was held for their examination. Taking it apart, they found a longitude, a latitude, and Pinnacle’s signature.

It was a trap for me, but I’d already accepted that probability by taking the fight to him at the beginning of this project. The only question was how long I was going to wait before showing up. Should I try to take him by surprise by showing up quickly or let him stew while he waited around for me to show up? I focused on killing Pinnacle for some insights on which would be better, but my powers suggested no actions on the matter that would bring me closer to my goal. My curiosity piqued by this anomaly, I teleported to right away into the trap and nearly got my ass blown away.

The Collector Colossal, one of Pinnacle’s supervillains, likes to collect large machines. He’s particularly fond of death traps, and apparently had one that was triggered by incoming teleports. Luckily, my reflexes are well above average, and he had chosen rockets as the payload for this particular trap. I had planned on taking evasive maneuvers upon arrival anyway, so I was a good position to get out of the blast radius with nothing worse than getting bumped around when the shock wave hit me.

The Collector himself was not around. Pinnacle just borrowed one of his facilities to wear me down before our final confrontation. By “our” I mean myself and something dressed up as Pinnacle. After battling my way through a swarm of mechanical hornets, busting through a maze of mirrors filled with deadly lasers, and batting away nine innings worth of deadly baseballs (don’t ask), I faced off with my antagonist. He was built like Pinnacle, moved like the superhero, and even fought like him. However, I knew killing him would not result in Pinnacle’s death. I wondered if this was a robot or an android or a homunculus but decided it did not really matter.

Our fight was strenuous, rolling through a factory line for poisonous pies, a deadly dark ride, and ending in a bowling alley of doom. I used the OSHA unapproved super-fast ball return system to sever the doppelganger’s hand and pinned his shoe to the ground to keep him from wandering away while I explained to him what was going to happen next. I was going to leave him alive so he could pass a message along to his master. The next time, Pinnacle had better face me himself or I would switch to killing my way through his associates. I would deliver the time and place to the hero at the address he had sent his message from.

The science and propaganda department will provide this week’s special event at headquarters. Apparently their mass mesmerizing machine has entered its beta stage, and they’re ready to try it on a large audience. They promise it will provide a unique entertainment experience for the audience. I won’t be participating. I need to go prepare my own trap for Pinnacle. Try not to become lobotomized zombies while I’m gone.

Before I pack, I thought you all might like to know that the Golden Web sent their latest package in our weird exchange of junk. They sent me a light bulb certified to have been in CBGB’s bathroom in the late 70’s. I’m afraid to touch it. Lord knows what it’s carrying. I am curious how it was officially certified, though.

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 to everyone.

This week we’re doing a test run on Pipewrench’s Dimension Projector. We’ve had to modify it from his original design. The destruction of his earlier build and my desire to wrap up this project means we’ve reduced the amount of automation needed to run the machine. However, that also means we’ll need more personnel to run the equipment. Throw in the assault and extraction teams I intend to bring along, and that calls for making a few shakedown flights before our attack.

I also want to take a moment to remind everyone that although this is Pipewrench’s project, I’m the one in charge. I would also like to remind Pipewrench that while I don’t arbitrarily kill my staff, I still find myself having to execute individual Technefarious employees on a regular basis.

Its overeager creator aside, the Dimension Projector is a slick piece of work. At its core is a Galaticguard Wrist Armory wired to the cutting from the Suncloud’s floating vine and enough Travel Apples to filled a garbage can. Flowing through that unnatural heart are arteries flowing with Cosmic Kinetic Fluid and Essence of the Southern Lights. It should have quite a kick when fired. I certainly wouldn’t want to be standing in front of it when it goes off. Once we have it in the air, we’re going to fire it on its lowest charge to see what happens.

We’ll also be testing the cloaking capabilities of the invisibility mist we collected. If it works against Technefarious sensors, it should hold up against those our target deploys.

For those of you not involved in Project Cut Flower, Frigid is going around this week collecting updates on the progress of some of our other projects. When we have this wrapped up, I have to make a decision on what we’re going to concentrate on next.

This week our propaganda department has decided to inflict culture on us. There will be a performance by some opera singers in Auditorium A on Wednesday if you’re interested. I’m not sure why they’re bothering. There hasn’t been a decent opera riot in ages.

Listen, nobody tell Green Needle about the opera singers, all right? She’d probably make me wear a tux.

In any event, I thought you all might like to know that another package arrived from our enemies at the Golden Web. It was an electronic pocket calculator from the 1970’s. It is still in its original packaging. Nine-volt battery sold separately. I’m going to have to consider our response.

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.

I’d like to officially announce here that the scope of Project Cut Flowers has been expanded. This is a result of my meeting last week with former Technefarious lieutenant Pipewrench. A native of the Suncloud, he joined Technefarious because our style matched his, but he left us before my immediate predecessor had taken control of our organization. He’s a big man, well suited to pounding on the steampunk machines he likes to build.

The destruction of one of those clockwork devices is what brought him to us last week. So far, Project Cut Flowers has consisted mostly of stockpiling materials for Pipewrench to run through his construct. We don’t normally do mercenary work, but Pipewrench used to be one of us and was paying very well. Since we now have nearly all the things he needs, he wants to expand our contract to have us rebuild his Dimension Projector in a timely manner and to assist him in its eventual launch. I cleared it with Frigid, then told Pipewrench we’d be setting aside our own operations for his, so I’d have to charge him a great deal of money. He agreed. Then I asked exactly what happened to the one he had been working on.

It seems that he had kidnapped the heiress Persephone Guilder. He assures me his demand for her ransom was not an indication of a lack of money but just a routine operation to ensure a steady cashflow. Since I had already had the computer department hack into his bank accounts, I believed him. However, living in the world that we do, a superhero had taken it upon himself to arrange for the release of Ms. Guilder without an exchange of money. Unfortunately, that hero was Grogan the Giant Lizard-Gorilla, who is roughly six stories high and well known for his property damage skills. By the time Grogan had extracted Ms. Guilder, half of Pipewrench’s base was rubble and his Dimension Projector’s assembly strongly resembled a large golden pancake instead of a three dimensional Rube Goldbergian clockwork. Hopefully, we’ll be able to avoid a similar mess this time.

Tonight, the propaganda department has hired the Demented Resistors to do a concert for us. The musicians have been mind-altered to think they’re playing a corporate gig for the Technalysis Foundation, so everyone can relax and enjoy the show. The Demented Resistors opened for Power Bow on his last tour and are supposed to be really good. I’m looking forward to it.

On Tuesday, we’ll be holding a memorial service for Henchmen 84U-4B (Rachel) from the science department. Technically, she isn’t dead, but the experiment she was working on pulled her into a non-string based dimension and transmuted her body to let her survive there. We’re not sure exactly how it happened, and we don’t have a clue how to reverse it. Decades of Technefarious history suggest that it is best to memorialize her now.

In the latest news of our package exchange program with our rivals at the Golden Web, I sent them back a glass jar full of mutilated gummy bears. Two headed, multicolored monstrosities will stare at the recipient with twin blank gazes. Perhaps the jar’s new owner will recoil for the horror of seeing three gummy butts sealed together. Probably not – no one has ever called the Golden Web wimps. Well, except for the Powder Keg, but that’s only because their answer to everything is to blow it up.

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.

It was quiet this week. We ran another segment of Project Cut Flowers, but this one did not require mobilizing all of Technefarious, so it’s understandable if you didn’t notice it. Operation Grass Clippings only required a couple of people to complete, so I assigned it to Frigid and myself. It was nice to get out of the office without being abducted by aliens or trying to oversee a small army in the field.

Operation Grass Clippings required a trip to the floating city of Suncloud. If you’ve never been, you’ve missed one of the wonders of the world. No one knows exactly how old it is, although it is referenced in Homer’s Odyssey. Somewhere in prehistory, a vine plant mutated or got hit by miscast magic or was the subject of a miracle, allowing it to exhale a mist that made it float free of the ground. For whatever reason, this floating planet didn’t die but instead grew bit by bit. Eventually, some bits of it did die, but the dried husks stayed entwined with the living vine. Slowly the plant grew larger and its discarded bits accumulated, turning into a floating mound and then into a floating hill and finally into an entire island buoyed by its white cloud of gas. Over the millennia, it accumulated passengers: birds, bugs, dirt, flowers, weeds, and trees. Occasionally it was tamed by a wizard or a god that wanted the living cloud for their own reasons, but mostly it wandered the planet, a little island of life in the sky. Eventually, it was colonized during Europe’s Age of Exploration. However, the European powers found it impossible to control the island’s course, making it difficult for them to do regular business with the floating colony. Finally drifting away from their old homes, the former colonists dubbed their land the Suncloud and developed their own independent culture that specialized in flight long before the Wright brothers developed the propeller driven airplane.

Frigid and I slipped onto Suncloud by the simple expedient of teleporting onto it. Flying is a poor option for sneaking in, because the Cloudians have developed the best flight detection systems on the world. Teleporting in was better. Oh, they still detected our arrival; it just made intercepting us harder. By the time their security forces reached our arrival point, we had already disappeared among Suncloud’s many tourists.

To give security time to settle down, Frigid and I pretended to be tourists and went shopping, giving me an opportunity to prove to my lieutenant that the stereotype of guys hating to shop is entirely true. Frigid chose her name deliberately, having been born with ice powers and no sex drive. Talk to her for a while, and you’ll find she finds the contortions the rest of humanity goes through for sex amusing. Apparently, she managed to have avoided going shopping with any guys in her life so far and found it hilarious that I lived up to the male reputation. I just smiled at her patiently and told her that the real reason I seized control of Technefarious was so I could make the henchmen do my shopping for me.

After stopping for some coffee with floating foam (a Suncloud speciality), we made our way to the edge of the island to try and find some plant matter to prune. The forests there had plenty of exposed stalks of the floating plant, but we wanted to do this with more subtlety than Jack and the Beanstalk. We finally found a sprout shorter than us, so I used my powers to figure out how to trim it off without killing it. Then Frigid encased it in ice and manipulated the temperature of the water inside of it to preserve its cells without letting them rot, or so I gathered from the long, detailed explanation of her process that she shared while she went about it. I didn’t actually understand it all, but as long as our science and occult departments are happy with her work, then I’m happy.

Of course, our attempt to teleport back out was immediately foiled. Despite our efforts to skirt security, they had managed to track us down. The squad was mostly just grunts, but I recognized their leaders. The first was Shiver, a young woman with a vibration based power set. The other was Caesar Rex, the Mechanical Canine-Man, my rival in having a completely ridiculous mix of names and titles.

Rex gloated that he had caught us and boasted about the jammer he was using to keep us from teleporting away. It wasn’t a bad little monologue, but I thought it was bit presumptuous of him considering he hadn’t subdued us yet. Oh, I won’t pass up a good monologue myself, but I do have priorities.

In this case, my priority was has to extract ourselves without killing anyone. Sure, we’re facing a couple of superheroes and some extra muscle, all of whom are usually expendable, but murder is more memorable than property damage and theft. At worst, I wanted us to be an annoying escape, not a focus for vengeance. Our teleportation device’s countermeasures had started processing as soon as it found itself blocked, so it would eventually get us out. The question was how to keep our opponents busy in the meantime.

Luckily, I had Frigid with me. Like any good ice slinger, the first thing she did was encase our opponents in blocks of ice. If she had been able to concentrate on maintaining the blocks’ integrity, that would have been enough to let us get away. Unfortunately, Shiver’s vibrations tore down her ice cube prison almost immediately. The hero threw herself at Frigid, forcing a standoff between Shiver’s excitation of atoms and Frigid’s storm of ice.

In the meantime, Caesar Rex and his goons had managed to extract themselves from their blocks, but I was waiting for them. Killing someone is much easier than disabling them, but I am highly trained. I served concussions and severed tendons to the help, then delivered an arrangement of sharp strikes and crushing blows to Caesar Rex, incapacitating his capacitors and grinding his gears. With his mechanical bits damaged, he dropped the jammer. That wasn’t what I was going for, but I stomped on it anyways, teleporting us away and ending the fights.

I told Frigid that the next time, maybe she should start the fight by destroying the equipment preventing our escape. She said thanks for the brilliant idea after the fact.

This memo is long again, so I’ll just write one quick note here about our package exchanges with the Golden Web. This time, our archrivals sent us a box full of the stiff, deadly gum sticks that comes with baseball cards. The science department was able to determine the entire lot of gum dates to the mid-1980s. Yeah, I have no idea what’s going on over there.

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.

Operation I-Should-Have-Probably-Named-It-But-It-Wasn’t-Part-Of-One-Of-Our-Take-Over-The-World-Plots-So-I-Didn’t was a success with some additional positive, if unexpected, results. We successfully rescued the soul of Henchman 98B-3O (Carl), which we expected, but it looks like it may have resulted in a proper secret origin story for him too.

First, let’s talk about the actual execution of the rescue. Carl’s soul was being held by the dragon statue Granquartz. Our occult department prepared some materials, and I hired the Positronic Ghost to deliver them to since he could complete the job more quietly than anyone currently on staff.

The Positronic Ghost was built by one of the former leaders of Technefarious, Dr. Masivo. The doctor had found that building a sentient computer was easier if the materials used were entirely antimatter. Unfortunately, antimatter has a bad habit of exploding when it actually touches anything on Earth. Masivo addressed that problem by building the entire thing slightly out of phase with the rest of the world. As a result, it could seen and heard and but not touched. In keeping with the theme, he built his computer an antimatter body of a seven-foot tall robotic skeleton dressed in rags. Dr. Masivo had a sense of humor.

I’ve always liked the Positronic Ghost. Sure, his attention span isn’t great, and you have to prod him sometimes to get moving again, but he’s a pleasant (if occasional abstract) conversationalist. I was sorry when he left us to pursue his own projects.

Positronic Ghost snuck Granquartz’s lair and coated the stone eggs in her nest with the dragon semen our occult department had prepared. Now fertilized, the eggs quickened within a couple of days and then hatched. Carl was reborn with his soul now attached to a body of baby dragon statue. The other eggs had also hatched with other souls Granquartz had captured. In the confusion of the dozen or so sudden births, Carl escaped from the Soil Six’s base and flew back to us. Apparently learning to fly with a body made of stone is easier than you might think.

The occult department has reattached Carl’s soul to a clone body but found that they did not have to detach it from the dragon statue. So if you see the clone or the statue walking around, keep in mind that they are both Carl. Given his unusual condition, we’re evaluating him to see what additional training and duties might be suitable for him.

Later in this week, the science department will start their battle robot contest. Be sure you get your filled out elimination brackets to Dr. Ratchetman by Thursday morning to have a chance at winning the betting pool.

I have one quick note on the package exchange program with our enemies, the Golden Web. They haven’t sent us anything back yet, but Frigid noted I should have put a mesmerizing subliminal in the Manimal Betamax tapes I sent the Golden Web. So thanks, Frigid, for the brilliant idea after the fact. I’m going to go be grumpy now.

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