Doctor Xyle's Story (Tobyverse)
“And at once I beheld the multiverse it all its glory. A billion billion dimensions and more, all stretched out in front of me for a perfect moment of transcendental cosmic bliss. And as I drank it all in, I saw all the myriad ways, where I was nothing, where I was a god, where the boy I hated as a child was president and where the Earth was ruled by dolphins. I saw all this, and at that moment, I had my revelation, my true understanding. I could step between the walls of dimensions as easily as walking down a hallway. Such was my gift. And with all these myriad worlds, some so close as to be identical, it didn't matter what I did to them. I could warp them and corrupt them and destroy them, bring them to their highest potential or smash them down to their lowest nightmare, and it didn't matter. There would always be another world. Always another place for me to go, always more playthings for me to use and discard. And it was the most beautiful piece of knowledge in the worlds.”
Doctor Xyle is today among the most wanted criminals in the world, thanks in no small part to the vast bounty that Atlantean authorities have placed on his head. His true origins are, at this point, lost and shrouded in mystery. At several points in the forties and fifties there was a man on the staff of several prestigious universities, studying fringe science and alternative energy sources, a man that matches the description of Doctor Xyle. At this time in is unconfirmed whether this individual actually was the Doctor, either before his career in villainy or after, or whether it is simply a look-alike. Doctor Xyle first came on the scene in 1957. Sweeping across the Mall in DC floating on a metal platform, he announced that he was going to take fifteen important politicians and scatter them across fifteen different hostile dimensions, where anyone who wished could try and retrieve them. He even left gates, produced seemingly from thin air. Nearby heroes responded, including Sophia Verres, Bombshell and Julian Faraday. After a dangerous series of conflicts, thirteen of the fifteen were recovered alive, and Doctor Xyle vanished. The technology he left behind defied classification, appearing to be parallel to several early developments in science, but far beyond any existing piece of technology. This was only the beginning of his reign of terror.
Striking dozens of times in the course of a decade, Doctor Xyle engaged in a series of heinous plots. He replaced important celebrities and politicians with identical but twisted duplicates, began swapping out chunks of the landscape for hostile jungle-scapes where everything tried to kill you and even stretched the boundaries of a grocery store to immense proportions, bombarding it with a reality-twisting energy that seemed to bring the products to a half-life. These new things hunted down the confused patrons and employees of the store, and only the presence of a local super-hero, out of costume and shopping for groceries, kept more people from dieing. But it wasn't until 1967 that Doctor Xyle began his ultimate scheme. Appearing in front of the Consuls of Atlantis, he told them, with a devilish gleam in his eye, that he had planted a dozen bombs around the city, strange other-verse tech that would level a neighborhood flat. He then demonstrated one outside the city, wiping out a tiny railside community. The Consuls had just begun to confront him, to demand from him what he wanted, when the troops began arriving. Appearing out of the same type of gate that Xyle had used all those years ago in DC, they were a motley bunch. Some were techno-knights, wielding strange swords that crackled with energy and high-tech plate armor. Some were ragged and war-torn, hard-eyed men and women who carried worn weapons and fought with an intensity that spoke of years of conflict. There were strange future-warriors who did not fight in person, but piloted a dozen deadly drones a piece. And some were dinosaurs, strange beasts that walked and fought like men, but whose thick hides and ferocity made them deadly in combat. The Atlantean authorities mobilized along with their super-heroes, and the street-fighting went on into the night. By then, Xyle had vanished once again and had reappeared, leading his forces in the heart of Progress City. It looked, for a moment, like Atlantis would push the invaders back when a strange, giant automaton rose from the bay, a war-bot that the Atlantean military swore wasn't their own. It had a strange Pharaoh’s beard and crushed enemy tanks like vermin underfoot. And then Xyle personally teleported one of his bombs on board and the might bot fell.
The Atlantean navy and a UN task force were only minutes away from reaching the island when Xyle put the last part of his plan into action. Even as a small plane launched from the AMS Cogwright, and Xyle's troops struggled to hold the city center, a bubble began to form over the entire island. The plane got through, but nothing else was able to get onto the island before the shield went up. The Atlanteans threw everything they had at the shield from the outside, including a couple weapons the UN task force didn't even recognize, but it was as if they weren't even hitting it. Xyle had put the entire island in a pocket dimension, stepped it halfway outside our reality, and it made his new kingdom unassailable from the outside. This broke the morale of the Atlantean forces inside the bubble, and as Xyle's reinforcements began to gate in, the Atlanteans surrendered. At least, a group of them did. Many instead went underground, creating the Atlantean resistance, a small movement at first, but soon grew to thousands of people. Faraday headed one arm, and a mysterious figure called “The Lost Voice” another. Xyle's troops patrolled the streets and the man himself sat up in his castle, a hideous thing plopped down on a hill overlooking the city. Xyle's earliest weeks were not pleasant for the Atlanteans, but it could have been worst. The dinosaurs rampaged through the slums, but bribes of meat and livestock seemed to placate them. The future-warriors had little interest in despoiling the populace, and Xyle's other mercenaries seemed to keep themselves in check, at least temporarily. The hard-eyed men and women were the worst. Except for Xyle. He lived like Caligula, reveling in hedonism and debauchery. Over the course of several months, while the Doctor lived the high life, the resistance grew in strength. Soon, there were whole districts that Xyle's men dared not go into without heavy firepower and numbers. But still, Xyle held the detonator to the bombs and still had an army.
From the outside, every inch of the shield was probed and pushed and tested, until finally a weak point was found. Nobody could get in yet, but messages could be sent. As Xyle's grip began to weaken, he took a greater interest in the island, and began cracking down. The worst days of the occupation were then, when Xyle's patrols swept the street every hour and the crack of rifles and the sound of fighting would scarcely die down in one location before they started up in another. It was a year and a half before the rebels started pushing back, taking and holding territory. But still Xyle ruled the island. They'd tried to assassinate him twice, and after he threw Faraday out of the top window of his castle the resistance knew they'd need to break his forces before breaking the man. It's recorded that Xyle was driven to heights of rage that seemed new for him. He was furious at his scheme crumbling before his eyes. And then the resistance learned where the shield was being broadcast from. And they'd found most of the bombs. They struck, and simultaneously the Atlantean ex-pats and collected heroes, bolstered by troops of a dozen nations waited, and as the shield went down the Second Battle for Progress City was underway. This time Xyle had not more tricks up his sleeve, and though his forces fought with skill and deadly precision, it wasn't nearly enough, and the reign of Doctor Dante Xyle was over before reaching its second year. He was captured then, after a vicious battle with several of the world's premier heroes, after he produced every more ridiculous levels of weaponry.
As the case for Xyle dragged on, he was imprisoned in the only place thought to be able to hold him, Sheol. It was there he recuperated, gathering the tatters of his sanity and restoring the vast ego that had once allowed him to plunder universes. He would later describe his stay in the world's premier super-prison as restful. This continued until finally he escaped, shifting the entire rec room into a dimension in which Sheol was a training facility for inter-galactic mass murderers. As the guards and fellow prisoners were ripped apart by homicidal, super-children, Xyle and a small cadre of his fellow inmates escaped. Doctor Xyle was then not heard of for years. Even decades. But recently, there has been mutterings that he has returned, with new weapons and new schemes to destroy not only Atlantis, but the world as well.
Personality: Doctor Dante Xyle has an ego that dwarfs some solar systems. His revelation was that there was a multiverse, so everything and everyone was his plaything, since there would always be more. He literally sees entire universes as his playthings. At the same time, he is filled with an endless desire for satisfaction, so he seeks out any new way to bring pleasure to himself. He's Doctor Doom meets Caligula meets Angstrom Levy. For the longest time, nothing phased him, and every setback just meant a trip to a world where the person that beat him wasn't so strong and wasn't expecting an attack. But after his defeat at Atlantis, Xyle has become angry, angrier than he has been in a long time, and his already tattered sanity has been stretched to its limit. He sees our world, which may be his world of birth, as an upstart and has targeted it specially. He has Riese-Diedrich Syndrome really, really bad.
Powers: Doctor Xyle began his life's work when he was either born or received the power to step between dimensions at will, and it has been this ability that has allowed him to achieve the rest of his power. He cannot teleport, so when he jumps between dimensions he is in the same place every time, and not every dimension can be reached from any other dimension, so he sometimes has to jump several 'verses over, staying in each one for a few seconds at most. He is also a truly brilliant scientist and scholar, and his powerful memory allows him to recall the details of any dimension he has visited already. He is one of the current foremost authorities on dimensional science, and has mastered a variety of disciplines relating to his travels. He can stretch space, open portals between worlds with technology and create pocket dimensions. He has access to weaponry, monsters and soldiers from many, many different worlds, and it is rumored that there is a dead world that he created, simply so he could store his various trophies, tech and weaponry. He has visited a dimension where everyone has super-powers, and since then has exhibited enhanced strength, durability and healing and appears to have lengthened his life-span somehow, since he hasn't aged a day since his first appearance.
