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