Dr. Lawrence Furmano

Dr. Lawrence Furmano is a highly unethical geneticist and physicist who has become irrationally obsessed with using Caleb Winters’ (see Nexus) mutant abilities to advance his research into interdimensional interface technology (and, not incidentally, achieve great power).

Description
Furmano is a middle-aged, slightly wild-eyed academic with a bushy grey beard. When in combat situations he’s usually wearing some kind of clunky-looking body armor, though he’s not really a field-operations kind of guy.

Though remarkably intelligent and superficially reasonable, even a little attention makes it clear that the good doctor is rather completely unhinged in classic Mad Scientist mode.

Origin/History
Dr. Furmano was involved in the 30s and 40s with Universal Power Systems’ work on interdimensional reactor technology.

In 2047 he became aware of Caleb Winter's existence (see Nexus) and (rolling a 3) theorized that Caleb's mutations might stabilize the reactor interface. He became Caleb's physician, faked the boy's death, and ran experiments with Caleb and the reactor.

In 2049 Furmano's experiments caused spontaneous remission of Caleb's autism and blindness. To keep him under control, Furmano sent Caleb to a juvenile detention center on fake charges while experiments continued.

In 2054 Furmano's experiments traumatically triggered Caleb's latent superpowers. Caleb went berserk, trashed the facility, and beat Furmano to a bloody pulp. When the police came to deal with the situation, they found records of Furmano’s illegal actions and arrested him.

In 2055, having recovered from his injuries and escaped from prison, Furmano went after Caleb with the help of several metahuman mercenaries. He made several attempts, ultimately succeeding in kidnapping Caleb and establishing a technological link to the “darkplane” through which Caleb was then channeling his abilities (see Midnight).

Before he could fully stabilize this link, he was defeated by Rebound, Wasp, Barricade and Lorelei, who rescued Caleb. In the process, Furmano developed several superhuman abilities of his own, related to the same “darkplane” dimension. He was arrested, but as his new abilities included the ability to teleport interdimensionally, holding on to him proved difficult.

In 2056, Furmano developed a working relationship with some extradimensional tyrants in a dimension that came to be known as “Oz.” The exact nature of his relationship with them is unclear. In any case, the forces of Oz were defeated (and apparently destroyed) by the combined efforts of several Colonial Bay supergroups, leaving the good doctor on his own again.

In early 2058 he made another attempt at kidnapping Caleb, this time successfully. After about a week of extremely unpleasant “processing”, he succeeded in artificially transferring Caleb’s link to the darkplane to himself. In the process, Caleb was exiled to another dimension, from which Furmano was unable to retrieve him (not that he tried too hard).

A few weeks later, Furmano became aware of Caleb’s return to the Earth dimension and Colonial Bay. Although his original purpose has long since been achieved, he’s still obsessed with experimenting with (and not incidentally torturing) the boy. However, he knows that Caleb has allies in Colonial Bay, so rather than go after him directly he is recruiting a more powerful team of metahuman mercenaries to do so New Zodiac.

Powers
Furmano is a genius scientist whose specialties are interdimensional interfaces, power reactor technology, and genetics. He is both a theoretical expert and hands-on engineer in these areas, capable of building and repairing innovative devices.

In addition to all the usual technology mad scientists have at their disposal, Furmano has developed special tech that connects to the interdimensional interface between Earth and the darkplane. Using this technology he can:
 * teleport himself and his allies to and from essentially anywhere in the world
 * perceive events at a distance, with a dark portal appearing to reveal his activity
 * assemble darkforce-constructs such as forcewalls, bonds, energy blasts, etc.

However, all of these effects depend on an interdimensional power reserve that takes weeks or months to fill, so he is very conservative about its use in combat or field operations. Instead, he uses his tech to gather enormous wealth, which he uses in turn to hire metahuman mercenaries to further his aims (see New Zodiac), and restricts his direct power use to teleporting and directing those mercenaries.

Personality
Though superficially rational, Furmano is deeply unhinged, and it shows.

He is fundamentally obsessed with achieving mastery of dimensional manipulation – he wants to do artificially what Caleb’s mutation lets him do naturally. What started out as a scientific ambition has become a megalomaniacal obsession: he believes his destiny is to eventually rule everything.

His delusions have also manifested as a growing degree of superstition. In particular, he has become a devout believer in astrology, and increasingly arranges his activities around astrological phenomena. This is particularly true of his assembly of the New Zodiac; he has chosen his agents (and their code names) in large part based on his idiosyncratic astrological beliefs.