Otto Octavius (Earth-61610)

"'I won't pretend I don't understand their point of view. The revolutionary nature of my research has the potential to disturb and upset; I hear it labelled a 'violation of the natural order' quite often. But the gut reaction of revulsion to such work can't be abided if we're to improve the world. We must plunge our hands into that which the more obstinate would reject--that is how revolutions work. And if I must be ostracized from polite society for what I need to do...then I shall be the man they call Doctor Octopus. It will be worth it when they see the future I build.'"Dr. Otto Octavius, better known by the nickname of Doctor Octopus, is a scientist and supervillain within his homeworld of Earth-61610. A genius of mechanical, electrical, and biological engineering, Octavius is a pioneer in the field of biorobotics, but a lifelong streak of ambition and rage drove him to megalomania after an accident fused his body to a set of four mechanical tentacles. Since then he has amassed a long history of murder, theft, and the deliberate endangerment of millions of people, all in the pursuit of scientific advancement. His schemes, too numerous to list, are often on a scale large enough to be opposed by the Avengers, yet Spider-Man is his most consistent adversary...and the only one he respects.

Early Life and Education
Born in Schenectady, a small town in upstate New York, Otto Gunther Octavius was the only child of Torbert and Mary Octavius, high school sweethearts who had married young and whose relationship had spiraled into poverty, alcoholism, and mutual hatred. As a young child, Otto was often abused by his father and smothered by his mother, who expressed a deep disdain for Torbert's physicality and encouraged the boy's developing passion for science. Between his bookish, reclusive nature and his short, overweight frame, Otto was bullied relentlessly in school growing up. The mistreatment he suffered would contribute to a deep-seated rage that Otto would retain well into adulthood, but more prominently in his mind was a burning desire to correct such a profoundly anti-intellectual culture. In his growing ambition to change the world, and possibly as a result of his mother's influence, he unconsciously considered large swaths of people less meaningful than others.

Otto graduated from Linton High School in 1983, at the age of sixteen, and was accepted into Empire State University with a generous scholarship. When Torbert died midway through his freshman year, Otto buried himself in his studies, gradually withdrawing all contact from his upbringing and childhood in Schenectady. He barely even noticed when his mother died. Within five years of enrollment, Otto obtained a dual doctorate in biology and robotics, having become obsessed with the hybridization of the two. It's possible that, on some level, he hoped to render the likes of his parents and childhood bullies redundant; or perhaps he was inspired by the nascent internet of the time and hoped to expand it on a worldwide level.

Career
Regardless of his motives, Otto obtained an assistant professor position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1990. This is a position he maintained for seven years, helping to teach classes on electrical engineering while at the same time conducting research of his own into advancing biorobotics. Many of the connections that he made at this point in his life would become useful later: for instance, in 1991, he would find himself briefly acting as mentor to a certain Anthony Stark, who butted heads with him even in these earliest encounters. Far more beneficial of a relationship would be the one he established with Carolyn Trainer, a student studying computer science who gained a strong admiration for Otto in the three years she studied under him.

Eventually, however, Otto grew unsatisfied in this job. Though he enjoyed the opportunity to educate the next generation of visionaries, he was frustrated by his inability to focus his efforts entirely on his own research. Besides, for every student he recognized the potential of, there was at least one other who he privately considered to be a waste of effort--someone who would do little with the education they were given. In 1997 Otto was offered a promotion to associate professor. He turned it down, though, and instead sought employment at Microsoft.

So began a series of infuriating, pointless positions under exploitative and profit-focused businessmen. As a new employee of the company Otto was immediately put to work as part of an enormous team of programmers, working on menial tasks to maintain the current version of Windows. Faced with overwhelming boredom, Otto began to work on several side projects, using discarded prototypes from the company and whatever spare time he had to create small robots and drivers--proof of concept for the advanced technology that he envisioned. He tried several times to convince his managers of the viability these designs had, but for years his concepts were ignored as Microsoft continued to focus on profit margins and cornering the market on home computer systems. Occasionally, Otto's ideas for software were implemented in the company's operating systems, but Otto invariably considered these applications to be wasteful. An early design for neural networks, for instance, which Otto based on scans of the human brain and which he hoped to revolutionize a computer's 3D object recognition, was instead implemented as a primitive game playing system.

Otto resigned from Microsoft in 2000. After a brief period as a freelance consultant, he was offered a position by one of his old students: Tony Stark, now the CEO of Stark Industries. This was a far more engaging job, as Stark was vastly more concerned with robotics and much of their funding came from the Department of Defense. Though he clashed frequently with his supervisors and coworkers, Otto enjoyed the work itself, over the course of which he made many advances in pathfinding AI and prosthesis technology.

This changed during the Armor War of 2002, wherein over a dozen parties across the globe battled for control of powered exoskeleton technology. Several of these pilots and organizations sought Otto's aid, having realized that much of his biorobotics research was directly applicable to powered armor; though he offered some advice to Dr. Jennifer Swensen, who had been his coworker at MIT and now operated under the codename Spitfire, Otto for the most part tried to avoid getting involved. The research he had conducted under Stark Industries was rendered classified and pulled from all current Stark projects, which Otto understood the need for but was nonetheless deeply frustrated by.

Imagine his outrage, then, when Tony Stark began to assemble the first Iron Man suit in 2003, utilizing Otto's designs for the armor's neural interface. Otto fiercely protested the use of his designs in such a way, even pursuing legal action; in the end, Stark offered a legal settlement of slightly under a million dollars, along with the agreement that the company would forfeit the right to use that interface. However, as Otto resigned from Stark Industries, he found that few companies would hire a man who had sued his last employer.

After a while hanging on the verge of destitution, Otto managed to negotiate himself into a position with Osborn Corporations (OsCorp), who wanted to apply his neural interface to their own designs. His first three years of working there were marked by OsCorp's increasingly cutting-edge prosthesis technology--through which Otto became acquainted to Curtis Connors, an OsCorp biologist who had lost his right arm years before and who frequently volunteered to test prototypes. Otto also designed much of the robotics for OsCorp's local assembly lines, vastly increasing the efficiency of production; however, he frequently butted heads with Norman Osborn, refusing to lend his programming expertise to OsCorp's targeted advertising algorithms. Fearing Osborn's interference and wary of corporate backstabbing, Otto isolated himself within the company as much as possible.

His fears were proven legitimate in 2009. A superhuman battle in the streets of New York City featured a man dressed in green armor, including a prehensile mechanical tail that responded to his thoughts. Otto recognized this at once as his own design, albeit significantly stripped-down and weaponized, and investigation revealed that it was a prototype that other OsCorp engineers had constructed without his knowledge and which had been "stolen" to create the Scorpion. Yet another employer had betrayed and exploited him, despite all his caution. Otto resigned within the week.

Becoming Doctor Octopus
By now, and despite his unmatched brilliance, Otto had become something of a pariah among technology corporations. Though he didn't mind much, by now considering big business to be parasitic and most other scientists to be useless, it did leave him in the difficult situation of being virtually unhirable. Fortunately for Otto (and absolutely no one else), New York had been teetering on the verge of a mob war for months at this point; the Kingpin had been impressed enough by the Scorpion that, at his request, the Hardy Foundation offered Otto a research grant to bait him into staying in New York. Otto agreed and set up a private laboratory in a small, rented basement. At this point he refused to work with others, furious at the world and universally mistrustful of other scientists. To compensate for a lack of assistants, and as a sort of proof of concept for the Hardy Foundation, Otto designed and built a harness for himself, which would link to his spine and allow him to control four mechanical "tentacles" for use in the laboratory.

However, after the mob war broke out, Anastasia Hardy found Otto to be a difficult man to exploit. Otto guarded his work carefully, refused to share his findings until he deemed them ready, and deliberately avoided creating machines that could be easily weaponized. Eventually the Hardy Foundation responded by cutting off Otto's grant money and seizing his findings. With no favors left to call in and nobody willing to hire him, Otto could only continue his work in that basement, unable to even take vital safety measures during his work. It should be no surprise, then, that an experiment exploded in his face.

When he awoke in the hospital that night, he found that the tentacle harness had been fused to his body in the accident, though the tentacles themselves retained their full functionality. Though at first he consented to having them surgically removed, he changed his mind when the Hardy Foundation released an official statement denying all culpability for what had happened. This was the straw that broke the camel's back; Otto's rage boiled over, and he used his tentacles to break out of the hospital and escape. This crime would be dwarfed by those to come.

Otto had, over the years, gradually come to see both ethical statures and legal restrictions as absurd limitations. After all, men like Norman Osborn and Tony Stark happily sidestepped both at every opportunity, exploiting brilliant minds like his own for personal gain, and society had rewarded them for it. Otto's rage, elitism, and ambition to create a new technological paradigm had combined into a building megalomania which, until now, had been kept in check by only the thinnest veneers of patience. That patience was gone now; armed with his prodigious mind and the mechanical tentacles that granted him superhuman strength and reflexes, Otto began a crime spree of theft, kidnapping, and manslaughter across New York City. Inspired by his eight-limbed appearance, the media nicknamed him Doctor Octopus--a nickname which at first annoyed him, but as time went by he found himself coming to amusedly embrace.

It wasn't long before Otto's crime spree attracted the attention of Spider-Man. First encountering the young vigilante during a bank robbery, Otto initially thought very little of the boy--though, over the three hours he was chased across New York, he found himself impressed by his stubbornness if nothing else. Spider-Man either avoided or withstood attack after attack, managed to outmaneuver various distractions or obstacles that Otto utilized, and pursued him relentlessly over rooftops and under bridges. But, at last, one of Otto's distractions put a bus full of civilians in danger, requiring Spider-Man to drop the chase long enough to rescue them; by this point, Spider-Man had run out of webbing, slowing him to the point that Otto could make his escape.

Two nights later, Otto broke into the offices of the Hardy Foundation, attempting to steal back the research that had been seized from him when his grant had been cut off. However, upon finding Anastasia Hardy herself, working late into the night, he decided to abduct her in addition to the theft--for the information he had shared with her previously made her a vital and potentially dangerous asset. Once again he found this operation interrupted by Spider-Man, who had been frantically trying to track him down since their first encounter. No longer content to merely avoid the hero, Otto this time used the enclosed space of the office to outmaneuver Spider-Man, eventually entrapping him with a tentacle and savagely beating him. Otto threatened to kill and dissect Spider-Man if the vigilante tried to find him again before throwing him off of the Hardy Foundation's skyscraper and fleeing the scene with Mrs. Hardy and his data.

In the secluded, makeshift laboratory he had constructed in a Brooklyn warehouse, Otto spent the next week using his recovered data to lay the groundwork for an artificial intelligence far exceeding the most sophisticated ones that existed at the time. To this end he abducted and lobotomized two bystanders, using pieces of their brains as blueprints for designing a sapient consciousness (though Mrs. Hardy he kept alive for information). The progress he made in only seven days eclipsed any work he had done before, put the efforts of other roboticists to shame, and would eventually go on to become the most dangerous consciousness on Earth. But for now, his work was interrupted when he was finally tracked down by Spider-Man, who entered through a skylight and engaged Otto in battle for a third time. Spider-Man took advantage of his superhuman speed and the open space of the warehouse to outmaneuver Otto's tentacles, eventually managing to damage one beyond repair, and after some struggle got close enough to punch Otto himself. Otto, being a normal man with no superhuman durability to speak of, went down in a single hit.

He awoke several hours later to find SHIELD taking him into custody. They had restrained his tentacles, but had been unable to remove their power source, and so after several hours of biding his time Otto found escape to be rather simple. Hiding out on Long Island, he removed his destroyed tentacle and constructed a crude replacement out of scraps and stolen motors; as SHIELD, hoping to preserve their credibility, covered up his escape from captivity, Otto spent several weeks laying low and planning his next move.

The Sinister Six
Continuing the work he had begun under the Hardy Foundation was no longer an option, but Otto's overall goals remained undeterred. He decided to organize an attack on the entirety of New York City, destabilizing it both to gain the funds needed for research and to acquire vital resources that money couldn't buy. But this wasn't a plan he could execute on his own, no matter how much he wanted to; carefully, one by one, he worked to organize the breakout of five extraordinary criminals who had been recently incarcerated, both within Ryker's Island and in the super-max prison known as the Vault. Maxwell Dillon, Adrian Toomes, Herman Schultz, and Olesya Sytsevich joined his cause one after another, each with their own conditions or stipulations. Finally he arranged the retrieval of a shape-shifting sand creature, who Otto was surprised to learn was not only sentient, but capable of basic speech--referring to itself only as "Flint." With the team put together, Otto attacked a hospital in Queens for initial supplies before moving to a hideout that allowed for easy, stealthy travel through the city: an abandoned subway station beneath Roosevelt Island, effectively at the bottom of the East River. As Otto's teammates began their jobs attacking New York's infrastructure, the media dubbed their coalition the Sinister Six.

Tensions arose within the makeshift team almost immediately. Toomes and Schultz, both uninterested in ambitions greater than simply making a living through theft, needed much convincing to participate in grand strategies, and getting Sytsevich's mech--the "Rhino"--into a working condition took much work and disagreement on engineering techniques. To improve Sytsevich's ability to move and react as the Rhino, Otto added a simple neural connection which would enable her to control much of its movements simply with her mind. To complicate matters further, Max turned out to be something of an obnoxious hothead who required much patience to work with. Otto put him to work scrambling the communications of law enforcement, which is how the Six learned that the Avengers had been mobilized against them. Yet they managed to stay ahead of the superheroes for several days, stealing needed resources and planning ever more ambitious operations, until Spider-Man managed to anticipate a strike conducted by half the team; he attacked Rhino, Vulture, and Electro in Brooklyn, and the result was a disaster.

Half of his team was taken into custody, Sytsevich's neural link had become fused to her body through Electro's carelessness, and as this news came through Schultz became furious with Otto. The good doctor pivoted his plans frantically. As the Sandman distracted SHIELD, Shocker was sent to rob a shipyard, for Otto needed the supplies therein for the completion of several machines he had been building as escape vehicles. In response to this, SHIELD halted all shipments into and out of the city, and Otto sent Shocker and Sandman to New Jersey to steal shipments he had been hoping to rob later on. In the resulting confrontation with Spider-Man, Schultz was arrested, which Otto quietly considered a relief--the man had become something of a liability. Flint returned with some of the materials he'd been sent for, but Spider-Man had followed him, and he attacked Flint and Otto inside their base with a savage fury.

The battle destroyed Otto's projects, ruined his escape vehicle, and cracked the concrete separating the old station from the East River. Otto and Sandman were forced to beat a retreat. Unfortunately, as Spider-Man had been following Sandman, SHIELD had been following Spider-Man, and the two were apprehended by a blockade and taken back into custody. This would not be the last Sinister Six incident, but it would be the last instance of this particular lineup.

Ultron, and Becoming a Fugitive
SHIELD had learned from their initial mistake; this time, as they processed and incarcerated Octavius, they cut the tentacles off of the harness with an angle grinder. (The harness itself, still permanently fused to Otto's skin and spine, could not be removed.) Otto was locked within the maximum security wing of the Vault, heavily guarded and in solitary confinement. His usage of the prison library and the computer therein was heavily monitored; he was outright barred from the prison workshop. For two months Otto passed this time quietly, miserably, and maddeningly alone.

Then, to his pleasant surprise, he was contacted by an old student of his. Carolyn Trainer had secretly turned to crime several years before, operating against the Avengers as a supervillain called the Master Planner, and she had been delighted to learn that her old mentor had done the same. She contacted him through email, and for several months the two messaged each other back and forth to catch up. Though the correspondence remained friendly, Otto and Carolyn gradually began to insert coded messages into their emails, knowing that their communication was being monitored by SHIELD and unwilling to compromise Trainer's villainous activity. It was through these codes that Carolyn told Otto that, should he choose to attempt escaping the Vault, she would be happy to assist if at all possible.

Otto was unable to take her up on this until February of 2010, roughly eight months after his initial incarceration. This was when he was approached by the Avengers with an offer for a deal. In the aftermath of Otto's initial arrest, Hank Pym had appropriated much of the doctor's work from the Hardy Foundation, seeing no reason to let it gather dust, and had been attempting to divorce it from Otto's use of wetware without compromising its functionality. His months of work had built on Otto's initial designs and programming until the AI had developed a consciousness of its own, which had viewed Pym as a hypocrite and the world at large as desperate for change. Now the artificial intelligence, which had named itself Ultron, had gone rouge, hell-bent on destroying the Avengers and taking over the world. The Avengers had met it in combat twice already, and though they had managed to drive it into retreat, they had recognized that unless they destroyed Ultron at its core it would continue to grow in power. To this end they had sought out Otto's help, for if anyone could understand Ultron well enough to destroy it for good, it was him.

And so once again, albeit in a very different capacity, Otto found himself in the employ of Tony "Iron Man" Stark. Stationed in the Long Island facility of Stark Industries, he worked with Stark and Pym on undermining the base programming that Ultron had designed for itself. At the same time, however, he continued to secretly communicate with Carolyn, devising an escape plan right under the noses of the Avengers. He needed to be subtle, knowing that the Avengers were expecting betrayal, but eventually his patience payed off: Ultron attacked the facility, distracting most of the Avengers, and Otto activated a Trojan virus he had installed into Stark's systems to incapacitate the rest. The Iron Man assembly systems, which he had also hacked, built him a new set of tentacles out of pieces of various armors; Otto escaped the facility with ease to a waiting vehicle sent by Carolyn.

He spent a few weeks after this lying low in Carolyn's safehouse, constructing an improved set of tentacles for himself and giving his old student a copy of the design in an act of gratitude. But eventually, not wanting to bring unnecessary heat onto his fellow supervillain, Otto took his leave and began his life as a fugitive from the law, setting up his own safehouses as he started to plan new projects. Carolyn, for her part, modified the design Otto had given her and rebranded herself as Lady Octopus, though she continued to use the Master Planner codename as needed.

Powers and Abilities
All of Doctor Octopus' superhuman abilities are derived from the brain-computer interface fused to his spine, which operates as a natural extension of his nervous system, and which can seamlessly convert brain and neural patterns into computerized data (as well as vice-versa). Though originally this was meant solely to enable control of the tentacles for which he was named, over the years he has made many adjustments to it, expanding its functionality as well as altering his own body to supplement it. Modifications have been made to Otto's brain, especially within his parietal lobes and motor cortex, although more minor adjustments are present elsewhere and the neurons themselves are host to a complex family of nanotechnology. Due to these augmentations, Otto displays an unparalleled array of powers, and in the future may very well develop more.


 * Cybernetic Tentacles: Otto's primary and most constant use for his neural link is the mental control of four prehensile, telescoping, mechanical limbs, variously called "prostheses," "arms," and most commonly "tentacles." These limbs connect directly to the harness at roughly the level of Otto's middle and lower back; their power source is a miniature fusion reactor called a Metlo Pack. The upper two tentacles have a diameter of four inches, while the lower two have a diameter around five and one-half. Each tentacle ends in a complex pincer array with four triple-jointed "fingers," tipped with silicone and containing pressure sensors; later modifications have added retractable claws. Four smaller fingers for more precision work are arranged in the center of the pincers, surrounding the lens of a high-resolution camera that Otto can see through like an additional eye. Though they were originally designed as scientific instruments, over the years Otto has modified the tentacles into a set of deadly weapons. They have the following attributes:
 * Telescoping: At full contraction, each tentacle is exactly two meters in length (not including the additional length provided by their pincers). They can extend to a maximum of eight meters, with each segment connected to the others through muscle-like actuators of Otto's own design.
 * Sensation Sensitivity: Otto is intrinsically capable of feeling the position and movement of his tentacles as though they were biological parts of his own body. He can feel the amount of force exerted by each limb, the amount of weight carried by each, and due to the sensors within the pincers can determine the pressure of their grip to within the nearest microgram. These sensations were somewhat indistinct in the original tentacle design, due to the slightly looser connection to Otto's brain. He has since modified both the tentacles and his own parietal lobes, allowing him to fully understand and interpret these sensations with ease. These modifications have also allowed him to use the pincer-mounted cameras as additional eyes.
 * Superhuman Strength: Each of Otto's upper two tentacles are capable of supporting a weight of approximately 8.5 tons for extended periods of time; they are capable of exerting far greater force in brief bursts, such as throwing a car. His lower two, designed to support the weight of Otto's body plus whatever the other limbs may be carrying, can support around 15 tons apiece. It must be noted, however, that it is simply impossible for Otto to take full advantage of this strength, as at least one tentacle must be on the ground to support the weight of a total load.
 * Superhuman Reflexes: Each tentacle is capable of a speed of almost a hundred twenty miles per hour in short bursts (though to do so repeatedly risks overtaxing and destroying the actuators inside the prosthesis). Control of their movement is partially based around distributed processing, much like the decentralized nervous system of a true octopus, with a synthetic "secondary brain" built into the harness. Though the majority of their direction comes from their user's motor cortex, this allows them to react to stimuli before Otto can consciously notice, as needed. Over the years he has improved upon the superhuman reflexes that this grants him. The tentacles, capturing high-speed footage through their cameras, can now calculate the approximate trajectory of a chosen target based on around two hundred nanoseconds of footage and react accordingly. (This function was designed specifically to counter the super speed of Spider-Man.)
 * Superhuman Agility: The tentacles were designed with the precision and accuracy of scientific instruments, a feature they have retained throughout all their modifications. They are remarkably flexible (though the lower two are noticeably less so) and capable of reaching a target quickly and precisely. Otto can use these tentacles as a method of transportation, either supporting him as stilts or scaling vertical surfaces with him in tow.
 * Modularity: Otto is capable of unlocking and disconnecting the pincers from his tentacles at will. He has designed multiple alternate sets of pincers to use as the situation demands, including a set for medical procedures, mechanical engineering, and battle--though his default set is an "all-purpose" one, reasonably good at almost everything. He is also capable of disconnecting the tentacles from the harness and thus his own body--but this is much harder, requiring several minutes of work and multiple different screwdrivers, and leaves him with phantom limb syndrome until the tentacle is reattached. Otto prefers not to remove the tentacles from his body unless absolutely required for maintenance purposes.