Professor Madison
Professor Madison was an American scientist from Reality Z-25 31-H, skilled both in genetic manipulation and in the construction of robots controlled by brainwaves. An old friend of Kelly, she served as a kind of ally to the “Terrific Two”, having notably crafted their superhero outfits for them. She had a similar relationship to Captain Evening, having notably built his iconic Skycicle.
Description
Physical appearance
Professor Madison was a woman with shoulder-length hair, usually wearing a skirt, shirt and labcoat as well as a pair of triangular glasses which most people found ridiculous. She was slightly taller than Kelly. (COMIC: Journey Into Misery)
Personality
Professor Madison was characterised principally by a steadfast cheerfulness bordering on bubbliness. Although a genius inventor, she was the epitome of the absent-minded scientist. She was criticised by her assistant Hank for often forgetting he existed, ultimately prompting Hank's turn to evil, and her extreme fondness for her old friend Kelly came with complete blindness to Kelly's many flaws, with Madison somehow suffering from the unassailable delusion that Kelly was “a warm, caring person”. (COMIC: Journey Into Misery)
Biography
Early life
At some point prior to moving to her laboratory in the middle of the desert, Professor Madison became acquainted with Kelly, being arguably the acerbic Kelly's only friend. She later moved to said hideout in the Mojave Desert, where she lived with the genetically-engineered, anthropomorphic rabbit Rodney (who became her life partner) as well as Hank Richards. She began developing various dagnerous devices she kept under tight security, such as a Deathray. (COMIC: Ghost in the Apparatus of the Spirit in the Shell of the Machine)
Reuniting with Kelly
In 2011, following their abduction by aliens, Kelly and her employee Jenkins travelled to Madison's remote laboratory to ask for her help in destroying the unbreakable alien chains handcuffing them to one another, as well as to get her to analyse their newfound superpowers. Kelly was glad to help, quickly getting through the chains using the Rabbit, a remote-controlled giant robot she'd been developing. However, during the following night, her Deathray was stolen from its vault.
With Jenkins eager for him and Kelly to act as superheroes under the umbrella of “the Terrific Two”, as he'd been hoping, Madison enthusiastically agreed to let them investigate the theft, and created indestructible superhero costumes for the two of them (as Madison's power of bursting into flames, at least, had made her go through outfits at an alarming rate of late). It turned out that the theft had been carried out by a vengeful Hank Richards, jealous of the attention Madison accorded to Rodney, who had highjacked the Rabbit. Kelly ultimately destroyed the Rabbit, despite it showing signs of having developed sentience, after Richards had been put out of commission. Madison refused to dwell on the possibility that this had been anything other than an accident. (COMIC: Ghost in the Apparatus of the Spirit in the Shell of the Machine)
Discovering Armstrong
Professor Madison and Rodney later came to stay at Captain Evening's home in New York City in order to help him, “Jenny Everywhere” and Merv the Griffin investigate Doctor Brain's recent usage of a transdimensional portal in a scheme to kill the Captain. Madison created a helmet-like device which could be used to detect and trace the formation of multidimensional portals. After the heroes hurried to the site of one such detected portal, and brought back a benevolent, but disassembled, living skeleton, Madison helped put him back together, checking against an anatomical chart. (COMIC: Enter–the Legion of Light!)
Testing a teleporter
Some time later, Professor Madison invented a set of teleporting booths. Another superhero friend of hers, Terry Tornado, agreed to help test it out. Despite Madison's assurances that there would be no such problem, Terry insisted on stripping out of fear of a “The Fly scenario”. However, there was a completely different malfunction during the subsequent test, with Terry rematerialising not in the second booth but in the neighbours' refrigerator. (COMIC: Terry Tornado and the Teleporter)
Things subsequently quieted down for Rodney and Madison, sinking back into as much of a sense of “normalcy” as could ever possibly describe the life of an anthropomorphic rabbit and a mad scientist. However, Rodney reflected that this was not necessarily a bad thing. (COMIC: Rodney's Epilogue)
The Singularity War
Madison and Rodney later visited a summit of scientific geniuses, for which reason they were unavailable during the Armagedda situation. Returning to the Fortress of Evening, they found the Odds gone, having been called away to England. Captain Evening gave her a call, asking her to house-sit for him. She enthusiastically accepted, intending to spend some quality time with Rodney enjoying the luxury accommodations of the Fortress. (COMIC: Battle of Britain)
However, Madison soon received a call from Kelly. She and Jenkins were being hunted as anomalies by the Bureau of Singularity, and Kelly had managed to captured a damaged portal to the Bureau's interdimensional headquarters. Madison repaired it before phoning the Captain for help. However, being busy with a different adventure with the Odds (COMIC: Singularity War) fighting Insecto and his minions, (COMIC: Battle of Britain) the Captain told her to activate his computer's Omega Protocol, summoning any available allies of the Captain's to the Fortress of Evening. Terry Tornado and Mysto the Space-Wizard responded to the call, and, with their help, they set off into the Portal. Before leaving, Madison downloaded half of her mind into an android duplicate of herself to guard the Fortress and the Portal itself.
Once at the Nexus of Realities, Madison was turned invisible by Mysto so that she could follow Jenkins on a discreet mission to find the office of the Director of Singularity. There, they witnessed the Director's obsession with keeping the Bureau's records in order. They revealed themselves to him and bluffed him into thinking they'd switched the labels on a number of tapes, and would only tell him which ones if he agreed to sign a contract guaranteeing that the Bureau would no longer interfere in Reality Z-25 31-H. With the day saved, all the heroes returned home. Most then left the Fortress, but not Mysto nor Madison, with the two spending the night together. In the morning, however, Madison was called away by Captain Evening, who needed her help at his current location (COMIC: Singularity War) to deal with the peculiar situation of the Blue Knight, an Arthurian knight whose mind had remained bound to his armour through the centuries even as his body wasted away, only to end up merging with the body of his descendant, Chief Inspector Dennis, due to the machinations of Merlin. (COMIC: Encore)
With the Odds, Blue Knight included, appearing directly in her and Rodney's bedroom thanks to Jenny's powers, it wasn't long before Madison took the Knight to the Fortress's labs and ran a battery of tests on them. However, she concluded, to the Knight's dismay, that Merlin's spell was a perfect merger, with no means available to her to untangle the Chief Inspector's minds from her male ancestor's, or even to transplant the merged mind in a physically male body as the gestalt Blue Knight (wherein which the medieval, male Knight was dominant) desired. Later in the same day, after the Odds defeated Ultimatron and uncovered Captain Perfect's dirty dealings, she joined in the afterparty at the Fortress to which the Captain invited all his hero friends, socialising with the Big Bad Wolf. (COMIC: Meanwhile, On Earth)
Madison and Rodney then returned to their lab and resumed their usual mad-science experiments. (COMIC: Child of the Stars)
Fighting the Cosmic Solution
Shortly after the Cosmic Solution robot arrived in New York City and began wreaking havoc, Madison received a phone call from a frustrated Kelly who had found that her powers had stopped working shortly after she destroyed Jenkins in a burst of anger (although she did not specify that she had killed Jenkins, only saying that he had “gone away”). Madison theorised that they needed to be together for both their powers to work, and, having seen the Solution on TV, urged Kelly to get Jenkins back as soon as possible so that the “Terrific Two” could help fight the threat. In the meantime, Madison reactivated her robot duplicate, which she had left in storage in New York, so that she could rally a number of other heroes.
After resurrecting Jenkins with Alicia and Babs's help, Kelly phoned the real Madison again, angrily reporting that her powers still weren't working; Madison speculated that they needed to resync their biologies to reboot their powers, something which she could achieve using a complicated machine at her lab in the Mohave Desert, but, with time short, Kelly hung up and decided to achieve the same results by sleeping with Jenkins instead. Jenkins's resurrection proved instrumental to ending the threat of the Cosmic Solution, though not in the way Madison, or anyone, had expected. (COMIC: Journey Out Of Misery)
Aftermath of the Cosmic Solution
After advising the Odds and other heroes to take a vacation, (COMIC: Road Trip Of No Return, Epilogue to Destruction) she set about directing the repair work to reverse the damage dealt to the city during the battle. She had the assistance of the Commissioner, of the Human Tree, and, of course, of Rodney Rabbit, also building Mechanoids to help with the heavy lifting.
Shortly after the group did their best to deal with the most significant bit of damage — a small rip in the fabric of the universe in Times Square, which they'd been unable to close and ended up reconverting into a handy method of eco-friendly garbage disposal — the Odds and many other heroes returned to help with the rest of the rehabilitation work, not wanting to leave their friend alone. (COMIC: Epilogue to Destruction)
A little later, while the Odds were fighting the Shadow Queen, they video-called Professor Madison, who remotely walked them through the process of reprogramming the Shadow-Ray to make new shadow-minions loyal to the Odds instead of the Queen. The call was still open when Evening was interviewed by Amanda Allen immediately following the arrest of the Queen, with Madison saying hi over the phone when Evening got to her part in events. (COMIC: Chasing Shadows)
The reign of the New Protectors
When the New Protectors began calling for independent superheroes to join up with them, Madison and Rodney Rabbit were seen in footage broadcast on Hero Hour among the various New York City-based heroes who headed to the city hall in good earnest, little expecting that within the day, the Protectors would slide from this voluntary sign-up to declaring independent superheroes to be outlaws overnight. (COMIC: Season of the Witch)
Welcoming Kate Five
Some time later, Madison and Rodney were in the living room of the Fortress of Evening when Kate Five and her friends, significantly harried after their encounter with Valmorri in Hell, teleported in without warning. She phoned Centennia, who'd gone to Angel Falls in search of Kate Five, to update her on this unexpected twist. (COMIC: The Search For Kate Five, Kate Five vs Symbiote - Chapter 6)
| Recurring elements of The Cosmic Beholder | ||||||||||
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