First Meeting with Mr. Freeze

The new principal, Sheldon, was actually quite capable and experienced, with a wide network of connections. His only problem was that his luck was truly terrible.

No, perhaps it should have been called abysmal.

His friends had nominated a total of six professors for him, and one of them happened to be Victor Fries, the future Gotham villain known as Mr. Freeze.

After reviewing their files, Sheldon planned to hire three of them, and Victor Fries happened to be among them.

After the invitations were sent out, only one professor accepted Gotham University’s offer, and that professor happened to be Victor Fries, Mr. Freeze.

Gotham University truly had a cursed fate. It had only just subdued a few demons and captured a few monsters; Jonathan the Scarecrow had barely left when Victor the Mr. Freeze arrived.

Moreover, Victor seemed to need this job desperately. Before Schiller and Bruce could discuss stopping Sheldon from hiring him, the invitation had gone out at noon one day, and Victor was already at Gotham University by the following afternoon. He moved as though he would soon be unable to afford food if he did not take the job.

Fortunately, just like Scarecrow, Victor was currently only an ordinary scholar and professor.

Schiller knew that even the later Mr. Freeze was considered one of Gotham’s gentler villains. He usually liked freezing Batman solid, then discussing philosophy and art with him. Most of his obsession and madness came from his love for his wife, rather than any particular desire to oppose Batman or Gotham.

The Victor Schiller met resembled him in many ways. Both had the classic image of scholars. Victor stood tall and straight, wore glasses, and kept the collar and cuffs of his suit impeccably neat. Though he looked somewhat haggard, he still appeared to be a learned professor.

Every professor had an individual office, but there was also a communal office where everyone gathered, worked, and chatted. After Jonathan left, his seat in the communal office had become vacant. When Victor arrived, he took Jonathan’s former seat, right beside Schiller.

During their first conversation, Schiller noticed that Victor’s gaze kept lingering absentmindedly on the ring on Schiller’s ring finger.

After a while, Victor finally steered the subject toward family and asked, "It seems you’re married. Is your wife in Gotham as well?"

In Western countries, bringing up someone’s marriage during a first meeting was not particularly polite. Some people might consider it an invasion of their privacy.

It was obvious that Victor was not in a very good mental state. He seemed anxious and desperately wanted to find someone who understood him.

Schiller froze at the question, unsure how to answer. He could hardly tell him that he had a Symbiote that watched too many television dramas, could he?

Schiller’s silence was interpreted by Victor in another way.

People were like that. When they felt insecure and overwhelmed by anxiety, they would unconsciously seek out others like themselves, hoping to find comfort in shared experiences.

Victor thought of Schiller’s rather astonishing résumé and wondered whether those thrilling detective stories might also contain a love story even more tragic and beautiful than his own.

With the sense of kinship of two wanderers far from home, Victor and Schiller quickly became familiar with each other.

As they continued talking, Schiller discovered that he and Victor truly had much in common. Victor most enjoyed discussing ancient philosophy, modern art, and religious art, while Schiller also loved theology and philosophy. They had endless subjects to talk about and could chat away an entire afternoon when neither had classes.

Schiller had never expected that the first true kindred friend he found after crossing over would be the villain Mr. Freeze.

But it had to be said that Mr. Freeze, before becoming a villain, possessed considerable personal charm. He was always gentle and refined, highly empathetic, and mild and organized in his speech. He had unique insights into many subjects, and talking with him reminded Schiller of debating experts in his field in his previous life. Their discussions always sparked countless flashes of thought.

This mild-mannered villain left a very favorable impression, something everyone in the office agreed on.

As Schiller’s exchanges with Victor deepened, he also learned about Victor’s current situation. Victor had already used cryogenic technology to preserve his wife, but the technology required a great deal of money and a facility with extremely demanding conditions.

The research institute that had originally funded his work was no longer willing to provide him with a facility due to insufficient funds. That was why Victor had hurried to Gotham University. Besides the decent salary, he had come for the cryogenic laboratory funded by the Wayne family. There, he could ensure that his wife remained frozen and that her condition did not worsen.

Viewed in light of Mr. Freeze’s later story, his actions might seem somewhat deranged. But in truth, most of his office colleagues could understand Victor. In this era, many people had proposed freezing patients with incurable illnesses and treating them only when medical technology advanced far enough.

Victor was merely one of the pioneers.

Schiller believed that a Victor Fries like this, even without suffering the experimental accident that turned him into the later Mr. Freeze, would still be a fairly dependable ally.

Compared with the little bat, who had yet to grow up, Mr. Freeze—with his world-leading cryogenic technology and head full of knowledge—seemed much more reliable.

To solve Mr. Freeze’s problem for good, they first had to cure his wife’s degenerative disease.

Schiller had followed Victor once to see the cryogenic chamber preserving his wife. Mrs. Fries was not especially beautiful, merely an ordinary white woman, but Victor’s eyes were always full of love whenever he looked at her.

Schiller asked the Symbiote in his mind, "Is there a way?"

The Symbiote said, "Her nerves have atrophied. It’s troublesome."

Victor looked at the cryogenic chamber and said, "My wife’s neurodegenerative disease is almost incurable. Her nerve cells are dying too quickly. I only had time to preserve her; I couldn’t reverse it at all. Even if I could barely control the cell death, immune inflammation would still damage her brain…"

Victor crouched down. Anyone could hear the despair in his voice. Perhaps he himself knew that freezing his wife and waiting for a solution that might never come was merely deceiving himself.

Schiller frowned as he thought. Victor might be a notable Gotham villain and a world-class cryogenics expert, but professional matters still had to be left to professionals—such as an even more elite neurosurgeon.

The next day, Schiller returned to Marvel’s New York.

When Strange saw Schiller in his home, he tossed the coat he had just taken off onto the entryway table and said, "Good God, you just swaggered right into my house!"

"I haven’t even settled accounts with you for selling my information to some organization."

"They asked me. There was nothing I could do."

After staring each other down for a while, Strange reluctantly backed down. "Fine, but you can’t expect me to act like a trained agent and say nothing. Besides, you threatened me first."

"Forget that. I have a way for us to make a fortune. Want to hear it?"

Strange asked suspiciously, "A way to make a fortune? If there really were such a way, you’d come to me? I heard you charged that Stark one million dollars an hour for a consultation, and he actually agreed!"

"When I heard that, I wanted to go back to university and study psychology!"

"Right now, a certain lady has an extremely severe neurodegenerative disease, and her husband may possess cryogenic patent technology unlike anything else in the world. You know, the sort of technology that could support someone for life through patent royalties alone."

"If you can cure this lady, we can share the patent."

Strange pursed his lips, sighed, and said, "I’ll say it again. I’m a doctor, not God."

"You think you can’t cure this disease?"

"But shouldn’t you at least let me see the patient first, instead of dealing with you, the middleman?"

"For certain reasons, I’m afraid you can’t see her. But I have all of her medical records here."

As he spoke, Schiller conjured a huge stack of papers from thin air. Strange took them and glanced through them briefly before shaking his head. "Impossible. She can’t be saved. Give up."

Just as Schiller was about to speak, Strange said, "This is no longer a matter of neuroscience. If you want her to recover completely, the difficulty is practically equivalent to turning a piece of cooked bacon back into a pig."

Then he looked Schiller up and down, finally settling his gaze on the ring on Schiller’s ring finger. Strange said, "…All right, my wording was too absolute. You could try finding someone else, although I don’t think there is a better neurosurgeon in this world than me."

"What if you worked with Stark?"

Strange was about to deny it, but after thinking for a moment, he said, "That Stark might have some knowledge of machinery, but applying his technology to neurosurgery would require extensive research and modification. If you can convince him to go to such lengths to study it, I can give it a try. But you’d better prepare a consultation fee that satisfies me."

Before Strange had even finished speaking, Schiller had vanished. Remembering the ring he had seen on Schiller’s hand and Schiller’s attitude, Strange had clearly misunderstood something as well. He sighed and muttered to himself, "Ha. Love… how stupid."

Schiller suddenly appeared behind Stark and scared him badly. Then Stark shouted, "I know you have that kind of magical power! But that doesn’t mean you should skip the elevator when going up more than thirty floors! Aren’t you afraid of getting stuck in a wall?"

Schiller said, "What kind of nonsense are you talking about? How could magical teleportation get someone stuck in a wall? That would be idiotic."

"I hope I never get a call from a repairman one day telling me that a human-shaped hole has appeared in one of Stark Tower’s walls."

"All right, I came to see you about something important."

Schiller pulled out that huge stack of documents again.

More than ten minutes later, Stark said, "You actually came to the right person. I know a little about neurology."

Holding a pen, he walked around the desk as he spoke. "You know, last time I got a huge amount of biomechanical data from Obadiah’s database. Some of it involved technology for modifying the nervous system to adapt to mechanical control."

"Those techniques are dangerous, but there is no denying that if they succeed, they could bring the precision of a human controlling powered armor to an unprecedented level."

"If machinery could receive commands directly from the neural center, it would eliminate the time needed for every secondary operation and allow all armor to truly move like an extension of the body."

"So you can do it?"

"No, not yet. Obadiah’s research into this technology also stalled at a bottleneck. There is a key technical hurdle that needs to be overcome, and none of us has any idea how to do it yet."