Primate Typings

From the Desk of the Deposed:

Welcome back from your weekend, everyone.

This will be my last post as the leader of Technefarious. After the pounding we took from the Younglights last week, Dr. Crankpot and D.O.C.T.O.R. unified in their opposition to me. They arrived at an agreement to split the rule of our criminal enterprise between them and rallied much of the remnants of our much-battered personnel to their proposal.

Naturally, I offered to relieve them from the burden of their lives for their presumption.

Before our conversation could to escalate to the point of deploying killing implements, the Elite Triad intervened. While they had some reservations about the change, they were backing the coup de tat by our former leaders. When I asked the Elite what would happen if I pursued my preferred resolution, they informed me that would have to view that as dissolution of our friendship.

That stopped me. I guess I’ve just lost too many friends over the past few months to lose one more over a stupid argument.

Crankpot and D.O.C.T.O.R. were magnanimous in the victory and offered me a position in their new Technefarious. I declined. I took over Technefarious because we had a leader I couldn’t stand. I haven’t exactly warmed to our newly renewed leaders since they’ve rejoined us, either. If I’m not in charge, I’m going to have to go.

I’ll miss you all. Bleach actually offered to come with me, but then I told I wasn’t planning on paying him, so you’ll get to hang on to him for a while longer.

That’s it, I think. I just wanted to leave a record of what happened, and let everyone know there was nothing too hard about the feelings involved. Really, none at all by supervillain standards.

Remember to take care of each other. The world is already yours – it just doesn’t realize it yet.

Your Former Leader,

Dr. Photius Callaway
The Killing Man

Author’s Note: This is not the end of Photius’s adventures posted on Mondays. This is just a good point to switch formats. Over the past year, I’ve stretched the memo format as far as I want to and occasionally beyond. These posts were only supposed to be around 500 words, but it seemed like everyone second or third one ended up over 1000 as I tried to tell enough of the story to keep things moving along. I’m itchy to work with the other tools in my storytelling kit, but I’m not done Photius. So, his story continues. It will just be told a little differently from now on. I’ll see you next Monday.

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