The Cryosphere's portal

Back to Professor Cryo's hidden schemes

Madman may be able to travel between universes as he pleases, but to the rest of the world, things aren't quite as simple. It took Venture Industries immense effort to create a limited prototype - and even then, they could never make it work except in outer space, due to interferences from Earth's gravitational field.

The Cryosphere has obtained similar portal technology through different means, though.

A number of years ago, several artists from across the world were abducted by Madman as part of his latest scheme. One of them was Maestro. This was one of the few times when one of Madman's plans backfired - while his scheme worked, he was unaware that Maestro had been given superhuman perception by Cryo; during his stay in Madman's base, he was able to get a look at some of his blueprints. Thanks to the information contained therein, Professor Cryo was able to cobble together his own inter-universal portal - which, thanks to teleportation technology provided by Gatemaster, was placed in space, at the Lagrange point behind the Moon. With cloaking technology to hide it, this secret portal has allowed Cryo to explore other universes.

Some of those universes were weak and unable to defend themselves against the Cryosphere's forces; they get raided for natural resources. Some universes have supervillains of their own, many of whom are brought into the Cryosphere to swell its ranks (the most notable among them is the elven wizard Antelus, who has become the Blizzard Brigade's magic expert). Some universes were destroyed and depopulated by a variety of disasters (one in particular was the home of Techno-Powermonger, who managed to sneak through the portal into our world).

Madman doesn't know about the Cryosphere's inter-universal plots, but he knows something is up - the presence of Maestro in the Continuum Orb (see Madman's secrets) proves that, at some point in the future, Madman will get very angry at Cryo's associates (and indeed, discovery of what's been done with his portal technology may be one of the few things that elicit genuine fury from him). In the meanwhile, however, he is no hurry to find out the details of the future.

Plot seeds:

• Excess Villains: Sooner or later, someone is bound to realize that the number of new villains showing up in the Cryosphere cannot be explained by local "power-brokers" alone. Spider Spirit already has his doubts; if he discovers what is really going on, and communicates it to the outside world, Venture Industries may need to send heroes to fight the agents of the Cryosphere in outside worlds.