Primate Typings

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.

I have never liked the MechaMen.

Giant robots have their place in the scheme of things. Certainly, they have been dead useful for keeping the Pacific Ocean’s population of giant monsters under control. The way Japan shattered China’s magical protections during World War Two left the entire Pacific Rim open to the rampaging critters. Certainly the superpowered population held them off for a while, but it was the rise of the giant robot industry that really brought the problem under control.

Still, to an organization like ours, they have a limited utility. Like any large military vehicle, they can be used to invade a country, but they are not terribly subtle. Yes, you could take a city with them, but your only option to deal with a building full of enemy combatants is to crush it. Technefarious is dedicated to as smooth a transition to our rule over the planet as possible. Ultimately, giant robots just are not subtle enough weapons for us.

The MechaMen have never been big on subtle. In the four decades of their existence, they have served as mercenaries for some of the worst tyrants and tryant-wannabees on the planet. They have a leaderboard for how bystanders have been crushed under the giant metal feet of each pilot’s robot. The two times they have managed to carve out their own government, they have ruled every bit as harshly as their usual type of employers.

I’m a villain, but I don’t like these guys. So when it came time to test our new weapon platform, it made sense to me to give our inglorious competition a bad turn.

It works. The earthquake machine we have been building as the centerpiece of Project Jelly Doughnut performed as expected. The Mechamen’s complex consisted of large hangers carved into a mountain. Past tense. It is now an oversized sinkhole. The containment field for the earthquake machine also worked. None of Earth’s the seismographs registered the attack, and the snow on the far side of Mechmen’s mountain did not even avalanche. Our science department reports that the containment field was not as focused as they expected, spreading the event over a wider area than their calculations predicted. They were disappointed, but I’ve done this sort of work to know that the real world factors always require refining the theory. However, large scale testing of the earthquake machine will have to wait until we start the final part of Project Jelly, Operation Flat Pancake.

We lost no one during the operation, but many of the MechaMen’s henchmen and on-base families died. You may want to take a moment to consider that.

Our facilities will be running with minimum staffing this week, although all hands are expected back Saturday to start the final preparations for the launch of Operation Flat Pancake on Monday.

Enjoy this week everyone, because we are going to have a busy next week and we’ll be even busier afterwards if we succeeded. The world is already ours – we’re just going to be bringing its attention to that fact.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man