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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Shadow" data-source="post: 4944976" data-attributes="member: 16760">The DoctorThe Doctor was one of the most astonishing telepaths and mind controllers ever recorded, able to manipulate even powerful psis with relative ease.  His raw power was matched only by his disregard for his fellow man;  the Doctor (no other name for him was ever discovered) was a eugenicist with ambitions of genocide.  He believed that psionics was the main axis of human evolution, and decided to exterminate all non-psionic supers, and probably eventually all normals, whom he regarded as subhuman.  Meanwhile he would rule the psionics with an iron fist, satisfying his own desires along the way.The Doctor began his reign of terror by picking up the pieces of P.S.I.  He forged a number of the surviving members, along with others, into a cult of personality focussed on himself.  To cement his hold on his followers, he cynically developed an elaborate "mythology" to shape their thinking.  In that mythology, the Phantom - a powerful psionic who had nonetheless destroyed P.S.I. - was a Judas figure, perhaps even an Antichrist.  Despite his own vast psionic power, the Doctor was not an astral-projector;  he regarded astral-projection as the "purest" form of psionics, with the mind at its most divorced from mere matter.  So the Phantom - who came closer to rivalling the Doctor in raw power than most, in addition to being astral - was regarded as the ideal Messiah figure who had gone horribly, tragically wrong.  The cult's term for him was "the Signpost" - the one who pointed the way to the evolutionary future.  The Doctor himself ("the Precursor") claimed to be receiving telepathic messages from the future from "the Pinnacle", the disembodied, supreme overmind of humanity's destiny.  The Doctor initially regarded his cult and its mythology as simply a tool.  (He used the female members as concubines freely, on the pretext of spreading his superior genes.)  But in the end he seemed to have begun to believe it somewhat himself.  In any case, he focussed his attention on the Seattle area, to keep the cultists' hatred of the Phantom alive.  He murdered the Freedom Squad with cold, single-handed ease, breaking American Eagle's wings as a final gesture of contempt.  He spared only Victrix (a psionic telekinetic) to be his concubine and slave, indoctrinating her into the cult.As the Doctor stepped up his efforts against Shadow-Force, he tried to kill Jessica telepathically while she was driving on the freeway.  Thankfully, the Phantom was sitting next to her in the car, and was able to shield her sufficiently to save her life.  This attempt enraged Erebus (already furious, as all of Shadow-Force was, at the murder of the Freedom Squad) to the point of assuring that the Doctor would never be taken alive.  (And in any case, it is doubtful whether any prison could have held him.)In the end, the Doctor fell by over-extending:  The fully-engaged Shadow-Force, backed up by Mystra and Chameleon and shielded by the Phantom, proved to be more than he could handle.  He ran for his life into another dimension using a stolen super-science gadget, leaving his cult to fend for themselves.  (Except for Victrix, whom he took with him to warm his bed and defend him from physical attack.)  Technoid created a similar device to follow him, leaving Beta, Photon, and the rest of the reserve team to fend for the city in Shadow-Force's absence.  Shadow-Force hounded the Doctor through several extra-dimensional boltholes before finally running him to ground;  in the end, Erebus impaled the man with his magically-charged cesti, while the Phantom kept his powers at bay.Victrix was taken home to be mentally healed, but she suffered too deeply from post-traumatic stress to continue being a hero.  (She has since left the Seattle area.)  The Doctor's cult dispersed in bewilderment upon his inexplicable fall;  many of the members are still at large.  Shadow-Force took up the burden of their city once more, this time without their allies in Tacoma, and life went on.</blockquote>

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