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