Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend everyone.

Frigid and I had a long talk before I wrote this post, and I ran the final draft past her before I put it up. She’s still more than a little irritated with me, but she said there’s enough rumors floating around about why things went down they way they did that an accurate explanation won’t upset her more than the rumors.

We wrapped up Project Cut Flowers last week, and it didn’t end as most of you expected. My apologies for that, but operation security required keeping this one close until I was ready to implement it.

As Suncloud personnel massed to attack our skyship, the Dimension Projector began its final countdown. The Projector is an ugly piece of business. It takes everything in its field of fire, disconnects it from its home universe, and throws it away. At the range we were at, it would take out the entire Suncloud and anything attached to it and turn them into a bit of flotsam bobbing in the reality streams between the universes.

I clapped Pipewrench on the back to get his attention as he gave orders to repulse the Suncloud’s assault. He turned on me in irritation then collapsed as the Incapacity Restraint I had slapped on him coursed through his body. It’s a useful little gadget if you don’t have to worry about your prisoner walking on their own feet or answering questions. With Pipewrench safely out of the command loop, I issued my own orders for Technefarious staff to teleport away, starting with those attending to the Projector and finishing with those holding off the Suncloud’s forces.

I stayed behind, waiting for the countdown to get closer to zero. I wasn’t really expecting anyone from the floating island to get to the command center in time to shut it down, but I also didn’t want to take that chance. We have enough enemies on this planet without squaring away an opportunity to get some of them off of it.

That’s when Pipewrench surprised me by talking. I’m still impressed by that. The Incapacity Restraint is pretty hefty piece of technology, and he had started to work around it in just minutes with no tools handy. He was curious about what I was up to. Well, curious understates his intensity. Sufficient to say, despite the effort it took him to gasp his words, he still took the time to pepper his questions with cursing. He couched his question in the form of an accusation, but I felt he deserved an answer.

I told him I had offered the Positronic Ghost a part in Project Cut Flower in exchange for money. The Ghost declined, citing Pipewrench’s involvement with the project. This struck me as curious. Certainly, Technefarious has its share of bad blood among its former employees, but it’s at rate far lower than most villainous organizations, even after factoring in the number that have personally died by my hands. It seems sometime before I joined the organization, Pipewrench had decided the personal limits of Frigid’s chosen moniker. This was unwise, as Frigid’s powers are well balanced between offense and defense. Pipewrench survived the experience, but there were rumors about it even back then. The Positronic Ghost’s vices include recreational snooping, and he happened to catch the event firsthand. When I asked about his distaste for Pipewrench, he shared this bit of history with me.

Although it was before my time, I still frown strongly on criminal activity practiced on fellow members of Technefarious. I have, in fact, slain henchmen for the inability to get along with their fellows. Nevertheless, I am not a hasty man, so I approached Frigid to discuss the matter. She was not pleased with me for bringing up her past with Pipewrench, but as my second-in-command, she has a significant say in our organization. Unaware of their history, I had agreed to set up Project Cut Flowers for him without consulting her. She saw through my soft selling and told me that if she wanted Pipewrench dead, she would have done herself. Furthermore, she then forbade me to kill Pipewrench on her behalf.

My hands tied, I proceeded with Project Cut Flowers as quickly as I could. Despite how irritating I found working with Pipewrench, he never presented an excuse to dispose of him. His use of Technefarious would even ensure he’d succeed in his efforts to send his former countrymen of the Suncloud adrift in the multiverse. Our contract, however, did not say whether or not Pipewrench would accompany them on the journey. After modifying his designs in our drive to save time, my staff had pointed out to me that if certain safeguards were removed, the Dimension Projector would end up traveling with its target, lost among the worlds. Before we had launched the attack, I had made sure those safeguards were removed.

In pain-filled grunts, Pipewrench told me he’d kill me himself. The countdown was almost complete by then, but I took a moment to answer him with some satisfaction that I certainly hope he tried as I was fairly certain Frigid would forgive me for self-defense. Then I allowed our teleportation teams to rescue me from the doomed vessel.

Satellite imagery indicates the skyship with the Dimension Projector disappeared from the Earth the same time as the Suncloud.

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.

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

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back to the base for everyone that attended Operation Invisible Distillation and a welcome back from your weekend to everyone else.

I’m writing this with tissues stuffed up my nostrils to deal with my bloody nose. I suppose I could go the medical department for something more dignified, but this is hardly the first time I’ve leaked the red stuff. It will stop soon enough.

This particular op took us to the mythical Caves of Oblivion, which aren’t as unappealing as they sound. Somewhere in prehistory, one of the lost pantheons of gods got into a fight with giant centipedes that were carved out of a mountain range. The Mountain Centipedes turned out to be terribly hard to kill but wouldn’t attack anything they couldn’t see. The gods dealt with them by filling a set of caverns with a mist that turned everything it touched invisible, tricking the bugs in the caves, and sealing the entrance behind them. Since no one else seems to have ever said, “Let’s go to that place where all those invisible monsters are stomping around. That seems like a good idea,” they’ve remained there unmolested for millennium.

We have no particular interest in the Mountain Centipedes, but that invisible mist they live in turns out to be perfect for part of Project Cut Flowers. Working together, the science and occult departments cobbled together some mist collectors, and I teleported into the caves with two of the extraction teams to deploy them.

I was going to have Frigid lead the teams, but Pipewrench insisted on coming along. Since he’s paying the bills on this one, I asked Frigid to mind the store while I kept him from getting killed. Upon reflection, this may have been a mistake, since we could have just stolen all of his stuff if he’d died. Oh well. Live and learn.

The deployment was a delicate business, since we couldn’t actually see anything inside the caves. Oh, we brought our sonar display goggles, but they turned invisible in the mist, seriously hampering their effectiveness. The caves are pretty big, but the bugs are still stomping around down there. Unfortunately, we lost Henchman 41L-9I (Sid) when he got stepped on. The occult department was unable to recover his soul. The divine nature of the Mountain Centipedes should have just destroyed it outright when they killed him, but the occult department tells me the enhancements of the soul catchers kept his intact. However, they could not reel it in before one of Death’s guides escorted him to the afterlife.

I earned the bloody nose at the end of the operation. We had siphoned off enough of the mist that contents of the cave were starting to emerge as faint shadows. I’d love to be able to blame Pipewrench for the injury, but it wasn’t his fault. In addition to our sonar goggles, we were also wearing personal cloaks so we would stay invisible as the mist faded. Unfortunately, the cloak for Henchman 38E-5J (Yuri) failed. One of the giant bugs noticed him within moments. I got smacked in the face knocking him out of the way of the bug’s strike. Once we were clear, a heavy weapons team pumped rockets into the Mountain Centipede, crippling it. Apparently, the problem they had with the bugs in the past was a lack of firepower.

By then we were teleporting collectors and personnel out of the caves, so I came back to my office to tend to my bloody nose and type up this memo. I think I’m going to goof off for a while now. Try not to tear down our organization for the next couple of hours. 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.

It’s good to be back. For those wondering where I was at the end of last week, I took a few days off. Escaping from the clutches of some deeply disturbed aliens was exhausting, so after I got back, I spent a couple of days at home catching up on my sleep. What’s the point of being charge of a supervillain organization if you can’t take a personal day now and then? Speaking of which, why did anyone place bets that I was actually on vacation with Green Needle in the betting pool about my disappearance? I’m a SUPERVILLAIN. Taking a vacation with a beautiful woman is the cover I use for committing criminal activity. Why would I lie about getting abducted by aliens to cover up my getting laid? The odds that Frigid had secretly staged a coup and had me assassinated was a safer bet.

Speaking of whom, I’d like to extend a special thanks to Frigid for keeping Technefarious ticking along while I was unavailable. I have reports on minor advancements of several projects while I was away. I’m happy to report I brought back my own contribution to our work from my trip. Among the materials I had Fusion Man make for me back on the Asyms’s ship were two energy collection rods that we were using months ago to gather his signature radiation for Project Cut Flowers. He didn’t know what they were, and I collected a lot in the short time we worked together since he was using his powers instead of just sulking in a cell.

Still, not everything during my absence was betting pools and serendipitous radiation collection. Frigid had to deal with her own insurrection while I was away. A half-dozen henchmen tried assassinate her, Bleach, and the Elite Triad. Strictly speaking, it was not a coup because they were acting on behalf of the Golden Web. Technefarious’s rivalry with the G.W. goes all back the way back to our founder, Dr. Crankpot. They tried to recruit the good (evil) Doctor at the beginning of his career, but he rejected them. Even as a youngster, he was a cranky old bastard that didn’t like taking orders. Technefarious grew out of the henchmen Crankpot surrounded himself with, so naturally we bumped heads with the G.W. in our competition to conquer the world. The current leaders of the Golden Web decided my absence was perfect time to strike at us.

I executed Henchmen 85G-0U (Charlie), 35S-6N (Hank), 91Z-0U (Robert), 43F-1L (Archie), 27L-5L (Scott), 21V-6C (Jean) for their infiltration of Technefarious on the Golden Web’s behalf. While we mull our response options, I had their ashes shipped back to the G.W. with a note and a bomb attached.

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