Mr Dracula:
Although we appreciate your business, we think your timeline for the construction of your castle may be difficult to meet. I understand, as you said, that “Belmont will rise against (you) soon” and of course that’s something we want you to be ready for. However, the building you have asked us to build is a 3 mile tall castle with hundreds of rooms. Additionally, you have chosen a difficult site to work at. The tiny peak of a tall hill is a hard place to build such amassive structure. Also, my employees are concerned about the constant thunderstorms and swarms of bats. Thank you for reading this and I hope we can work to reach an understanding.
Thank you,
James Phillips,
Foreman
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Mr. Dracula:
Again I feel I need to write you to inform you of some problems. While working on constructing the first floor of your castle, some of my employees were attacked by a flying creature. While bat attacks have become par for the course on this project, the creature that attack my men was something different. Specifically, it appeared to be the floating head of the mythical gorgon, Medusa. This head chased my men, teeth gnashing, until it chased one of them clear off a cliff. As we are a small company, any losses of employees are unacceptable. We would appreciate it if this matter was your highest priority.
Thank you,
James Phillips
Foreman
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Mr. Dracula:
I would like to thank you for coming to the funeral services of our lost mason, Chris Belmont. His family appreciates your willingness to attend. However, they asked me to pass along a concern they have. Ever since the funeral, their son, Brian Belmont, appears to have gone missing. They’ve requested that I ask you if you knew his whereabouts, as everyone at the funeral agrees you were the last to see him. We understand that you have a long-standing feud with a Belmont family of Transylvania, but I would like to personally assure you that family has nothing to do with my former employee’s family. If you have any information, please pass it along to the Belmonts.
Thank you,
James Phillips
Foreman
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Mr Dracula,
As I assured you when we initially wrote out our contract, my company is a Christian owned-and-operated company. As such, we take issue with a few of the designs you’ve requested. We feel somewhat personally offended that your have asked us to put upside-down crosses on everything in the castle. Also, we do not feel comfortable building what appears to be the Satanic confessional on the upper level. Your note on the building plans says “Evil confessional – ghost priest will impale victims.” We feel that this is inappropriate for our company to build. As a working professional, I will recommend an alternative company to complete this area for you.
Thank you,
James Phillips
Foreman
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Mr. Dracula:
I fear I must inform you this will be our last correspondence. The remainder of my employees have been killed. By skeletons. I do not know how skeletons came to populate your mostly-finished castle. However, the presence of said skeletons, as well as the ghosts, zombies, giant, empty, axe-wielding suits of armor, murderous, living furniture, and what appears to be the Lord of the Flies, Beelzebub, hanging from a hook, present an OSHA-classified work hazard, and as such, we will be unable to complete work on the upside-down “inverted” castle you asked us to balance delicately on top of the existing castle. However, most of the work that needs to be done is finished. I hope this will not be too much of an inconvenience. However, as I fear for my life even as I write this due to the possibility of ravenous flea-men, I fear I do not have any other options.
Thank you,
James Phillips
Forem–
(the rest of the letter is smeared with blood and ectoplasm.)
A Letter to Dr. Wily from His Outsourced Robot Manufacturing Plant
Dear Dr. Wily,
We regret to inform you that we have been unable to complete your last order. We have had to cease production of your robots, and we have several questions which need to be addressed before we can resume production.
Our first question: why must all of your robots be sentient? Because of the order of construction followed as per your directions in our manufacturing process, your robots are built beginning with what we will call, for lack of a better word, the “brain”, which is then placed inside a rudimentary “skull”. This creates a terrifying entrapment in which the robot is cognizant of its own existence, as well as all the information, memories, and feelings you have implanted them with, but unable to communicate or even move. This horrible living hell they become trapped in only gets worse after the robot receives its internal “skeleton” body. The robot has to feel the sensation of being bolted to a sheet of metal, repeatedly electrified, and having 5000 degree molten steel poured over their bodies. This industrialized torture process creates robots that are mentally unstable and ready to kill everything they see (as soon as their vision sensors are cruelly and slowly screwed into their skulls).
This brings us to our next concern: your robots, which you say are for various industrial purposes, are, in effect, dangerous lunatics which likely would be mentally incapable of focusing enough to cut lumber or power electric generators without finding a way to kill hundreds, if not thousands of people in the process. Upon the completion of one of your prototypes, code named “BRIGHT MAN”, our manufacturing professionals found themselves running to shield their eyes from the flashes of incredibly intense light the robot generated. Several of our employees were completely and permanently blinded, and in their confused, blind stupor, many of them wandered into machinery and were brutally killed. One fell into a vat of molten steel, another was bolted into a sheet of metal, and one, who was actually driving a forklift and the time, went on an accidental killing rampage, hydraulically crushing and impaling many people. As plant manager, the screams of my employees, many of whom were my friends, will haunt me every night for the rest of my life.
Another issue which we have run into is the procurement of supplies needed to construct your robots. As I stated before, you have told us that your robots are used for industrial purposes. However, I can’t think of what constructive purpose a robot like “KNIGHT MAN” or “GRENADE MAN” could have. As you may be aware, military munitions are difficult for us to obtain as a civilian factory, to say nothing of the difficulty in finding thousands of medieval flails. Especially when one considers that you demanded a low price for the contract (which you promised was a test agreement for a series of lucrative government contracts), this agreement does not seem particularly cost effective for us after the semi-legal procurement of these various components.
This brings us to our last concern. After the construction of these robots, you have asked that we ship them to a variety of locations (and, curiously, place them in empty garages to “await Mega Man”, a mysterious instruction we don’t fully understand). We have several international clients, and ordinarily this isn’t a problem. However, the variety of shipment locations you have requested are remarkably difficult to ship to. I’m not sure if you are aware of the costs involved with shipping hundreds of thousands of tons of sentient robot killers armed with nuclear reactors and explosive munitions to incredibly remote locations, but suffice to say that they are prohibitive, to say the least. FedEx and UPS have also both filed several Patriot Act investigation requests against our company, which has been both a PR disaster and a legal entanglement which our employees and management, to say nothing of the company itself, may be unable survive. At least 7 of our employees have been relocated to internment camps, never to be seen again. What was left of our plant’s senior foreman was returned to our main office in a manila envelope.
Again, Dr. Wily, while we value your business, we feel that these difficulties must be overcome to ensure our working relationship can continue. We hope you feel the same way.
Signed,
Eric Fischer
Plant Manager, Prototech Industries
P.S. We appreciate your attendance at our last stockholder meeting! However, we were a bit concerned at your constant hand-rubbing and cackling. Many attendees felt your behavior was “curious” at best and “scheming and evil” at worst. Please refrain from such behavior at future events.
