Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Well, it’s Monday, again. Yay.

We’re going to have to build a new Base Omega. Base Omega would be our backup base of last resort. Unfortunately, we’re standing in our current Base Omega right now, since the rest of our bases were blown up. Not our best week.

For those keeping score, we fought State, Overclocked, Hope Titanson, Silver Spear, Goldfish, Living Goo, and Hammerstone. Those would be a handful of the many members of the Younglights, the superteam Record Holder belonged to. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume their attack was in retaliation for my murder of him a while back. No one every said that a supervillain’s life is an easy one.

Our reconstruction of events is pretty patchy. We lost too many people and too much property to do a proper after-action report. We know State and Hope caused most of our problems. His moniker is the Quantum Android. She’s a goddess/reality TV star. Instead of a wacky television show, his reality distorting powers and her ability to make miracles created a storm of power that enclosed our headquarters and fritzed out much of our equipment.

Overclocked was responsible for the destruction of our soul catchers. With security distracted by the reality storm, it wasn’t hard for the robot to rip through our facility at superspeed, knocking out sensitive equipment as he went. The soul catchers were the very first thing he hit, but I don’t think they were trying to ensure our people would stay dead if killed. That’s not really been the level of violence the Younglights practice. I think it was aimed at me. If they were running an operation to avenge Record Holder, then it would make sense to cut off all avenues for my escape. The stories about our soul catchers have been making the rounds, but I think that the Younglights didn’t realize that not only was I not connected to the soul catchers, I can never use them myself. I guess the history behind my powers isn’t as widely known as I thought.

While that damned robot trashed our stuff, Silver Spear, Goldfish, Living Goo, and Hammerstone chewed their way through the base, neutralizing our staff as they went. I finally concluded that the heroes had pulled us far enough off balance that the loss of the base was inevitable, and I called for an evacuation.

That would have worked fine, except Hope and State’s reality storm didn’t like our teleportation signals. The first wave to teleport out didn’t die, thankfully. Instead, the storm anticipated their arrival point and blew up that location. That’s how we lost our first backup base. It was a pretty big boom. Our teleportation system detected the newly created obstruction at the location and immediately routed them to the next emergency point. That’s how we lost our second backup base. The Teleportation system switched to the next and the next and the next, and then we were all out bases.

That’s excepting Base Omega. For paranoia’s sake, you cannot teleport to it. Turns out that is a handy feature for just this kind of screw up.

With our evacuation options reduced to escape by vehicles, it was clear that someone was going to have to stall the Younglights while everyone else scattered. So, I gathered up Bleach and the Elite Triad and headed out to do just that. To my surprise, Dr. Crankpot joined us. As old as he is, I wasn’t really expecting to want to mix it up with people four or five generations younger than himself. While we attended to that, I assigned D.O.C.T.O.R. to coordinate the evacuation. With everything else screwed up, his big AI brain was in the best position to maximize Technefarious’s flight.

The Younglights are good fighters. I have to give them that. None of the killing scenarios for them that I envisioned during our brawl were easy to implement. I’d get the upper hand over one of them, and one of the others would intervene. The flipside was that they couldn’t take us, either. The Elite’s capability in the fight wasn’t a surprise to me, but Dr. Crankpot’s was. The dude can scrap. Sure, he couldn’t match the Younglights in speed or power, but he had an endless stream of knick-knacks and gadgets to screw with them.

All of that was just a cover for Bleach. Hope and State’s reality storm was keeping our vehicles penned into our base, so they needed to be taken out. With their teammates occupied by us, Bleach could get close enough to them to drain their powers down enough to break to the storm.

The end of the storm meant our people could escape. It also meant that our equipment could hook back into our satellite network. D.O.C.T.O.R. analyzed the restored data stream and informed me that the reality storm had not gone unnoticed by the larger superhero community. The Establishment was dispatching the Executives to deal with the matter.

Their arrival would likely not go well for us, so we beat down the Younglights enough that we could disengage and ran. D.O.C.T.O.R. had held a drill sled for us. As we plunged into the Earth, he informed us that the Establishment had arrived. From there, it was every vehicle crew for themselves.

Only one-third of Technefarious arrived at Base Omega. I’m sure some of the missing are just lying low, and that others have decided this would be a good time to desert our organization. Worse, some died in the attack. There’s simply no way to prevent it in an assault that thorough, no matter how good the superheroes are at their job. The remainder (probably the majority) of the missing are probably sitting in jail cell or in a hospital, waiting for the local authorities to attend to them. Now we need to figure out how to rebuild and how to recover our people.

This is a setback, but the world will be ours. Have a good week, everyone.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man

From the Desk of the Dictator:

Welcome back from your weekend, everyone.

Right. Sorry about being gone for the past two week. It takes forever to get around when you’re the size of a molecule and flying the Brownian motion.

I should probably explain that. I was away on a mission to break Bleach out of jail. He was being kept in one of those SuperMaxed brand prisons set up to hold supervillains. Considering what they have to contain, they do a pretty good job keeping people in. None of them are perfect, though. After all, things have to be able to get into a prison everyday: guards, lawyers, new prisoners, food, supplies, air, light, gravity, quantum forces. Add in a world with superpowers, and you can see the kinds of problems they might have keeping things out.

Newer henchmen may wonder why Bleach didn’t kill himself and allow our soul catchers to extract him from his captivity. The answer to that is that we don’t want to encourage the Establishment to build something that will stop Technefarious souls from being caught by our equipment. They don’t have one yet, and I don’t see any point in putting them in a position of needing to accelerate their countermeasures.

The countermeasures they do have are enough to make a jailbreak interesting. They can’t use everything they have. For example, the K1 anti-teleportation field interferes with the EverSee anti-cloak field. It’s not anything dangerous, but it turns everything in the overlapping fields pink. Which countermeasures they use on their prisons is highly classified information that could only be uncovered by a massive intelligence operation orchestrated by a sophisticated long-term enterprise. Luckily, Technefarious is just that kind of organization.

This time, we decided getting small was the best way to break into the prison with all the stuff we were going to need to break out. So, our science department shrunk me and my equipment – wow, that sounds dirty now that I’ve typed it. They shrunk me and snuck me into the home of a member of the prison’s staff so I could hitch a ride on their clothes when they went to work. I won’t reveal which person unintentionally smuggled me into the prison, but I will say that the warden keeps a very tidy closet.

The frisking scans that everyone entering the prison is subjected to did not detect me. Between my microscopic nature and the cloaks we had on my equipment to hide their energy signatures, there wasn’t much that they could have picked up.

From there, I began my epic journey through the prison to locate Bleach’s cell. That sucked. I couldn’t move faster than the air around me. A power expenditure strong enough to get me anywhere in a reasonable amount of time would be detected by the passive energy scans that blanket the prison and trigger the alarms. I also didn’t know exactly where Bleach was being held in the facility. Technefarious hadn’t had a chance to hack that information yet, so I spend most of my time floating around, trying to locate him. Not fun.

Finally, I found him. They had him in the general population cells, which surprised me. Power drainers like Bleach aren’t the deadliest people in the world, but I still figured he’d have been placed somewhere in special security. He even had a cellmate in his cell. Those two bits of information are called foreshadowing.

I sent a signal to Technefarious to mobilize the rest of the operation, dropped the cloak off my equipment, and inflated myself back to full size (Here, I would like to apologize for not finding a way to make “mobilizing the rest of the operation” sound dirty, too). Alarms went off. Bleach and his cellmate were surprised. Suppression fields dropped down to stymie the launch of the equipment I brought for the rescue. Suppression fields we already knew about because they’re part of the prison’s countermeasures – countermeasures that have known interference problems. Known problems generated by the equipment I brought with me and triggered when I dropped the cloak. Now the cell was filled with a squeal that made my incisors shimmy, an inadvisable level of ozone, and a distortion that made my vision look like I was peering through a fish-eyed lens, but all the rest of the equipment I brought would still work.

I started to fill Bleach in on what the next few steps would be, but then he collapsed. They had placed him in the general population because they had jammed subdermal implants into him to keep him under control. With that future shadow behind me, the other tried to get my attention with a vigorous shake of my shoulders.

Here’s a tip, kids. When dealing with an armed supervillain occupied with busting his buddy out of jail, it’s probably best to try to avoid the appearance of attacking them in any way, shape, or form. It cost the cellmate the top of his left ear, mostly to keep him from bugging me again than any real concern I had about an attack from him. However, turning to look at him to make sure I didn’t stick him in the eye during the strike did mean I got to get a good look at his face.

He was Dr. Crankpot, founder of Technefarious and known to be dead for over three decades now.

At that point, he started screaming at me about who he was, how important he was, and how powerful his organization Technefarious was. I cut him off (verbally this time), informed that I had been in charge of Technefarious for years at this point, and that I did not answer to him. Then I grabbed him by the front of his shirt, squatted downed to pick up Bleach, activated my flight suit, and blasted my way through the walls of the prison.

Dodging bullets, heart-pounding action, blah blah blah.  I flew away and met a Technefarious extraction team that had set up a couple miles away when I sent the signal at the start of the exciting part of the jailbreak. While our medical staff removed the tracers and other equipment jammed into our jailbirds, I coordinated the repulsion of the prison’s pursuit.

Then we all teleported home.

The End.

Oh, if you see Dr. Crankpot in the halls, he isn’t your boss, so you don’t have to do what he says. I’ve assigned the Elite Triad to keep an eye on him while we sort him out.

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 everyone.

For those of you wondering how I was going recap the end of last week’s reality rewrite, I’ll say that the solution involved a cartoon animal orgy. Now let us never speak of it again.

Rather than press on with one of our big projects this week, I authorized the recovery of Henchman 98B-3O (Carl). We lost him during our operation against the Soil Six when he was eaten by Granquartz the Magnificent, the giant living stone dragon statue that makes her home in the Six’s base. Normally, we would have just brought Carl back by putting his soul into a clone of his body, but after the battle his soul did not show up in the Technefarious’s soul catchers. Our occult department determined that Granquartz had somehow ensnared Carl’s soul during the fight.

While I was away last month playing with aliens, our wizards figured out a way to extract Carl from Granquartz’s claws. Most of the process could be accomplished using in-house resources, but there a few aspects that needed to be brought in from outside. I took it upon myself to arrange for their acquisition, which means I got to call Bleach into my office and tell him to bring me five gallons of dragon semen. I love being the supervillain in charge.

He succeeded in his mission, but refused to discuss the details after he got back. I thought that was a little odd. I mean dragon semen isn’t as useful as dragon blood, but it is available on the black market. He would have just told me if he bought it, right?

The occult department did their work on the materials Bleach had acquired, and then all that was left to do was to deliver the load. I decided to go with a more subtle approach than our last attack on the Soil Six’s base. Since Quanquartz’s quarters are in the caves in the back of their base and we weren’t trying to steal anything out of it this time, I went with a phase-shifter to sneak in. No one currently on our staff specializes in that power set, but I make it a policy to stay on good term with former Technefarious employees whenever possible. I contacted the Positronic Ghost and he has agreed to make the run for a tidy sum.

There were no henchmen deaths to memorialize this week. Hopefully, that’s a good sign for this operation.

In another news, the Golden Web responded to cremated remains of their agents, the note, and the bomb we sent them the other week. They responded by sending back a fruitcake with a file baked into it. The science and occult departments tell me that it doesn’t seemed to be booby trapped or otherwise stranger than it appears to be. I had it teleported to one of our storage facilities in the asteroid belt to play it safe. I responded to the Golden Web’s puzzling package by sending them a set of pirated copies of the television series Manimal recorded on Betamax tapes. I had the commercials left in.

This week’s recreational activities include the propaganda department screening a marathon of Larry Lemur animated shorts in auditorium A. I won’t be attending.

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.

If you had not heard, the ceremony to rebuild the soul catchers finished late last week. The reconstruction was successful but not without complications. Henchmen 41T-6Y (Roger) of the occult department did not have his personal wards as tight as they should have been during the work. When a Facet Wraith took the opportunity created by the ceremony to slip into our dimension, the monster drained the life from him faster than I could kill it. If anyone knows anything about his possible heirs, please contact human resources.

With the soul catchers back up, we have been deep in preparation for Operation Big Question, the next step of Project Jelly Doughnut. Our objective is to capture the stone dragon eggs of Granquartz the Magnificent. The living dragon statute Granquartz lives deep within the cliffside base of the Soil Six. An assault on their cliff-embedded dome should divert their attention from an attack through the earth by the drill sleds. Even with the distraction, units on the sleds should expect only a limited amount of time before the Six respond to their prong of the attack. In addition, Granquartz is unlikely to leave the eggs even during a fight, so the armory will distribute sonic weapons help keep her at bay. As always, unit leaders should keep interference from unanticipated superheroes in mind. Assault teams Z, X, and W will be assigned to the frontal assault, supported by Extraction team Alpha. Assaults teams Y and V will provide cover for extraction teams Beta, Gamma, and Delta as they recover the eggs. Extraction team Epsilon will be held in reserve. The motor pool and armory should have all equipment for the operation ready to go by Wednesday night. The medical and occult departments should be ready to deal with causalities once the operation gets underway this Thursday.

The relic department has announced that this weekend will see the kickoff of their latest show. The one will focus on the Renaissance, including several pieces on loan from the Grand Connoisseur’s Collection of Stolen Art. That means they will be taking down the trans-dimensional items displays late in the week, so if you have not checked out the Collapsed Echo Universe or the Cracked Man’s Deed to the Earth, you only have a couple more days before they go back into storage.

Have a good week everyone. And 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’m happy to announce that the soul catchers should be back online tomorrow. The first of the materials was gathered last Tuesday. It was a simple enough matter for the occult department to summon a demon. Negotiations for some of its ichor broke down quickly, so naturally we supervillains turned to violence to get what we wanted. Eleanor Flask kicked off the festivities by dashing holy water across the circle, burning our visitor and ruining the glyphs containing him. Frigid kept the demon off balance with an oversized snowball (seriously, Frigid, a snowball?). That made time for a taking-a-leave-from-his-leave Bleach to whitewash the monster, draining it of color and power. Having suitably weakened it, I immobilized the demon in solid stone by running it through with the Sword of Statues. One cordless drill and a beaker later, we had enough ichor to rebuild the soul catchers and pursue a few other side projects. Keeping an annoyed demon around qualifies a ludicrously dangerous, so I cut a deal with him before sending him back to hell. In exchange for not pursuing revenge against me or my people, I gave him the Void Cask. We will see how well that works.

Getting the fresh angel feathers took a bit longer to arrange. Oddly, the angels of good are often reluctant to meet with supervillians; I cannot imagine why. Despite my unsavory reputation, Marvela the Mystic Medium agreed to arrange a visitation for me with one of heaven’s lackeys. While I cannot recommend bargaining with demons, their divine counterparts are another matter as angels rarely try to exploit loopholes once a deal is struck. In return for a selection of her feathers, I gave the angel the soul of the hero Marble Crusader, a prize left over from my earliest experiments with soul catchers. While I am sure this will bite me in the ass in the long run, it was better than the alternative. Unlike the denizens of hell, the residents of heaven rarely betray one another by spilling each other’s blood, so attacking one angel tends to bring the rest of her host down on your head. Keep that in mind if you ever have to deal with one. 

Unfortunately while the soul catchers were down, a simple car crash took the life of Henchman 84E-9J (Robin) last week. Her maintenance work in the motor pool was essential to keeping our operations smoothly. Our condolences go out to her family.

Necro-Craze is visiting us this week to assist in rebuilding the soul catchers. While he is here, he has agreed to give a lecture on advanced Necrolife theory. Catch him in Auditorium A on Wednesday night. The annual fumigation of the biology labs will take place Thursday, so expect limited access to the northeast facility that day. I am sure this is unrelated to the fumigation, but the cafeteria menu lists Friday’s special as “Culinary Surprise.” I don’t know about you, but I think I will eat out. 

Have a good week everyone. And 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.

Well, we all found out what happened to the henchmen corpses I was keeping in the lobby, didn’t we? For those that missed it, a giant Frankenstein monster with too many heads and limbs interrupted the screening of Iron Boots. While the Duke growled about the American way and justice that looked a bit like revenge, the monster ripped its way through the auditorium, tossing chairs and henchmen aside as it plowed straight toward me. At the back of the auditorium, Dr. Philip Alexander of the science department ranted something about revenge against the world and taking my place as leader of our organization. Honestly, I cannot tell you exactly what he said, because I was not really paying attention to him. Although I do remember wondering why he thought killing me meant the Elite Triad would follow him. In any event, Dr. Alexander seemed to think my reputation for being able to kill anything did not extend to things that were already dead. He was wrong, and soon enough, he was dead.

He left a mess behind him though. In addition to the damage in Auditorium A, Dr. Alexander destroyed the occult department’s soul catchers, in order to keep them from raising me from the dead. Unfortunately, there was collateral damage to his attempt to kill me. Everyone, please take a moment of your day today to remember Henchman 22O-0D (Sean), who did not survive the rampage. He served our organization in Cafeteria B, keeping our villainy fed and ready to fight against heroes the world over. He will be missed.

While we will continue preparations for Operation Big Question, we will delay its execution while we repair the soul catchers. Most of the materials from the old ones can be recycled, but the demon ichor and the angel feathers have to be freshly gathered. Until then, we’ll just have to take the risks of living like the regular mortals we are. Except for Saber-Cat, of course. This does not affect his immortality one way or the other.

The medical division will be distributing flu shots this week. Please take the time to get one. The LEGO club is displaying the best of this quarter’s creations in Break Room C, so stop by and check their work out. Finally, a viewing party for the annual Dimensional Sky Rift is being held at the top of the southwest tower Wednesday night. The meteorologists are predicting clear skies, so we should have a spectacular view of the eruption. I hope to see you there.

Have a good week everyone. And remember, the world is already ours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway

The Killing Man