Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Dictator: 

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

Well, that was plan 1,782 for world domination into the recycling bin. Most of them never make it out of the planning stages, but this one actually looked like it might succeed for a few days.

Our initial plan (with the full title of PROJECT JELLY DOUGHNUT: GIANT EARTHQUAKES FROM SATTELITE BASED EARTHQUAKE MACHINES) worked well. All the resources were assembled with minimum losses on our part. The equipment built worked within expectations. Things did not fall apart until the implementation of the last part of the project, Operation Flat Pancake. The initial developments went well: the world knew we were demanding their capitulation, the earthquake machines worked well, and the Establishment was off balance. Delivering our message to the entire world at once undermined the public’s confidence in their governments, making the world’s nations more susceptible to our threats. The earthquake machines could focus sharply enough to target conventional military equipment. We proved that by picking off of several fighter jets in mid-flight while we were roughing up the armed forces of the more belligerent nations. Which just left the various unconventional forces of the Earth.

Considering how many millions of superpowered people we have on our planet, it’s surprising how few offensive superpowered units are part of any of the world’s standing armies. I suppose that’s partially influenced by superhero traditions that sprang up over the course of the last century, then reinforced by treaties worked out by the victors of World War II to set limits on the escalation of warfare fueled by superpowers. I know the Iron 56 incident in Germany near the end of the war scared both the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. pretty badly. Even now, Earth acts as the home to at least fifteen beings that could destroy galaxies or entire universes. The idea of setting their patriotic planet killers against each other gave the world leaders pause, and the resulting treaties are thought to have prepped the ground for later treaties about nuclear weapons and other WMD’s. 

The Establishment, of course, doesn’t belong to any nation. Its Board of Directors is drawn from the global superhero population, theoretically making in neutral in international politics. This gives it the strength to coordinate the superpowered population for the Earth’s regular repulsion of extra-dimensional and extra-terrestrial attacks. By the same token, the Establishment rarely interferes with anyone’s domestic or international politics. So if we can ever convince the nations of the world to surrender, the Establishment is less likely to continue the fight. At the very least, it would shrink the pool of resources its leadership can draw from.

Of course, first you have to convince the nations of the world that the Establishment can’t come to their rescue. So they found our satellites pretty early in the first day but had trouble doing anything about them. Technefarious has decades of data about superpowers from which we developed defenses for the satellites to hold off the Establishment. According to our models, each could stand up to ten thousand years of attack. We actually hoped they would stand up to an average of about eight hours of abuse, because ours is a weird world, and there’s always some new power source popping up. Of course, we had three warehouses full of replacement satellites that we could teleport into orbit whenever one got destroyed. They kept the Establishment busy. So busy that it really unnerved the national governments that the Establishment could not just stop the earthquakes. Unfortunately, the Establishment could have kept popping our earthquake machines pretty much indefinitely, and their own bases are turned out to be mostly immune to the satellites. Our intelligence department chalks that up to all the oddball powers the Establishment has access to, so we had to take to fight directly to their leadership.

This is where things fell apart. Dealing with the Suit and his elite Executives is never easy, but it had to be done. While our assault teams conducted distraction attacks against the Establishment’s regular forces, I lead a direct assault against the Executives. I can’t give you a firsthand account of most of the fight. I targeted Suit himself, naturally enough. On paper, the man should only be a second tier hero, but his decades of experience leading the Establishment make him too dangerous to leave breathing. He used those decades of experience to take me off the board. I spend most of the battle trapped in a “dead room,” where Technefarious’s remote equipment could not reach me. I could have gotten out of that easily enough, but the Suit had dug up a guy called Grimmed.

I can kill anything. It’s my most notable superpower. What I can’t guarantee is that my victim will stay dead. Grimmed died a lot over the next few hours but was back and intact with seconds. When I tried to leave him just maimed, the little bastard killed himself. If Bleach had not eventually convinced Green Needle to have the Chlorophyll Cabal join our assault, I’m not entirely sure when I would have gotten out of there. Green Needle eventually tracked me down, and she solved my problem by hitting Grimmed with a paralyzing need, followed up with another shot that put him to sleep.

Despite my personal problems, we actually made a good accounting of ourselves. Technefarious left three Executives dead (although I’m sure they’ll be back among the living soon) and completely trashed their base. Unfortunately, by then it was a moot point.

The Executive Gearhead had managed to break away early in the fight to continue his research on the beams our satellites were emitting. While the Establishment’s base collapsed around him, he managed to develop a counter-field and deploy it. Within seconds of turning it on, our satellites became useless. The Establishment still hasn’t found everything we put in orbit, but with the heroes’ new ability to stop our earthquake machines with a flick of a switch, we’re going to have to file Project Jelly Doughnut in the failed plot drawer. 

Oddly enough, we suffered no deaths this week. Our base was never compromised, so the soul catchers and cloning equipment never went offline. I think this is the first time we’ve ever run the final operation of a project and none of our people died. It feels strange.

In any event, this memo is running long, so check the bulletin boards for this week’s events.

Have a good week everyone. And remember, the world is already ours – it just outfought us this time.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man

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