When the atmosphere eased slightly—when Victor lowered his freeze gun and the immediate threat of violence passed—Jude finally had time to examine the surrounding environment more carefully.
A complex, large-scale refrigeration system occupied a substantial portion of the abandoned factory floor. The engineering was impressive, even beautiful in its precision. Wires were deliberately bundled and routed to one side rather than hanging loose, preventing the chaotic tangle that would have been both unsightly and dangerous. The humming sound of the machinery was remarkably quiet—barely audible even in the warehouse's silence—carefully designed not to attract the attention of passersby or curious police patrols.
Ice-blue liquid flowed through transparent pipes at regular intervals, circulating with mechanical precision. The fluid appeared to be extremely compressed liquefied frozen gas, maintaining Nora's preservation through constant temperature regulation. The whole system formed a closed loop—input, circulation, output, return—keeping her suspended at the exact threshold between life and death.
There was no doubt that a considerable portion of the money Victor had stolen from his many bank robberies had been spent building and maintaining this massive machine that ran twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year.
This was more than equipment. This was his wife's life support device. Her technological cocoon. The only thing keeping her cells from deteriorating beyond any hope of revival.
The remaining funds had probably been spent consulting famous specialists and experimental treatment researchers. Considering the absolutely criminal prices of medical services in the United States—particularly for cutting-edge oncology and cryogenic consultation—it was entirely reasonable that Mr. Freeze had needed to rob banks multiple times. He'd probably committed this morning's robbery because he was nearly out of operational funds.
The real robbers—the medical system, the insurance companies, the pharmaceutical corporations that priced life-saving treatments beyond the reach of ordinary people—they were never on wanted lists.
Jude couldn't help but grin at the irony. Then he realized the expression might seem threatening or inappropriate given the circumstances, so he forced his face back to neutral.
Mr. Freeze casually hung his weapon back on his armor mount. The freeze gun's barrel flashed with ice-blue bioluminescence, visually beautiful in the dim warehouse lighting. The color was somewhat similar to the two thin hoses extending from the refrigeration tank on his back—a matched set of cryo-technology, all part of the same integrated system.
Looking closer, Jude could see that the hoses were actually transparent. Inside them, liquified frozen gas circulated directly into Victor's armor. After being processed by the suit's internal mechanisms, the temperature was raised to approximately zero degrees Celsius—still freezing by human standards, but survivable for Victor's altered physiology. The system achieved precise cooling throughout the armor's interior, maintaining the exact conditions required to keep him alive.
"That cryostasis chamber you built for your wife is genuinely beautiful," Jude said, meaning it. "The engineering is remarkable. The precision required to maintain that level of preservation—most research facilities couldn't replicate what you've built here."
"No matter how beautiful a crystal coffin is," Victor said quietly, his voice heavy with exhausted despair, "it's still just a coffin."
His expression darkened when the conversation turned to this topic—to Nora's condition, to his failures, to the impossible situation that defined every moment of his existence.
"I just want her to recover. To wake up. To live again." His armored hand gestured helplessly. "But I don't have much money left. And by the time I manage to steal enough to afford the experimental treatments I've researched, she won't have much time remaining before cellular degradation becomes irreversible."
"Robbing banks isn't exactly the right approach to this problem," Jude pointed out, playing devil's advocate deliberately. "Maybe it would have been better to leave her at Goth Corp? Those executives claimed they wanted to continue improving their cryogenics research project. They should have secured sufficient funding through investors. There's no way they'd let such valuable research—and such a perfect test subject—just die, right?"
The moment Jude mentioned Goth Corp, Mr. Freeze's face showed obvious disdain, disgust, and righteous indignation—emotions so strong they were visible even through his helmet.
"They had absolutely no desire to continue legitimate experimental research," Victor said, his voice bitter with the knowledge of betrayal. "They had no ability whatsoever to improve the project without me directing it. In fact, after I'd been working at Got Corp for only three months, I realized they were nothing but a shell company. All facade and no substance. A scam designed to attract venture capital investment."
As he answered, he visibly regretted the decisions he'd made in desperation. The choices that had seemed necessary at the time but had led him down this path to criminality and isolation.
[Flashback: Goth Corp Laboratory]
His wife's condition had worsened rapidly after he'd joined Goth Corp. The cancer had progressed faster than any of the specialists had predicted. Victor was forced to place Nora into the cryostasis chamber he'd developed—suspending her life processes, freezing her at the cellular level, hoping desperately that the medical community would develop an effective treatment plan before it was too late.
The night before the procedure, they'd held each other in their small apartment.
"Victor," Nora had asked, her voice weak but still carrying warmth, "will you continue to stay by my side after I fall asleep? Even if it takes years? Even if I'm not really... here anymore?"
"I will never let you go." His voice had been fierce with conviction, with love, with desperation. "Not in this life. Not ever. I promise you that."
The next morning, he'd gently kissed his wife goodbye. Helped her into the chamber. Sealed her inside with tears streaming down his face, his hands shaking so badly he could barely work the controls.
And then she'd been gone—not dead, but absent. Suspended. Waiting.
However, just one month later, everything fell apart.
"Victor." Ferris Boyle stood in the laboratory doorway, holding a financial report like it was a weapon. The boss who had always spoken so kindly, who had promised unlimited support, who had convinced Victor to join Goth Corp with talk of changing the world and advancing science.
Now, looking at the quarterly budget numbers, Boyle's expression had completely transformed. His brow furrowed. His mouth set in a hard line. His tone shifted from collegial to coldly businesslike.
"This research on cryogenics is simply too expensive. The operating costs are astronomical." He spoke in a low, flat voice—the tone executives used when delivering bad news they didn't actually care about. "Don't even mention me personally. No company looking to generate profit would continue funding this project. The return on investment timeline is completely unacceptable."
"But, Boyle—" Victor stood from his workstation, confusion and panic rising in his chest. "This is different from what we agreed on. You said the company would definitely provide the corresponding financial budget. You said you believed in me, that you supported this project, that Goth Corp would see it through to completion. That's the only reason I agreed to hand over my research to the company!"
"Victor." Boyle shook his head with obvious disdain, the contempt of a successful businessman for a naive academic. "You're an adult. You should understand how the adult world works. People only believe in contracts written in black and white—legal documents with binding force, not verbal promises."
He tapped the contract folder he'd brought. "And our employment agreement only states that the completed research and all associated patents will belong to Goth Corp upon project completion. It doesn't specify anywhere that I'm legally obligated to help you actually complete the project. You didn't finish it. Instead, you've wasted the company's entire first round of seed funding. This already makes me very angry."
Boyle's voice hardened further. "I strongly advise you to be cooperative and cut your losses while you still can. Accept reality. It will be better for everyone involved."
Victor felt his world collapsing. His eyes were bloodshot from weeks of sleepless nights. He wore cheap glasses and a discount suit—the only professional clothing he could afford after medical bills had consumed his savings.
He practically fell to his knees, desperate and pleading. "It will have an extraordinarily high payback period! This project will be incredibly valuable in the future—you'll see returns of millions, potentially tens of millions! Please! My wife's life depends on this research! Just give me more time!"
"Okay, okay, Victor." Boyle's voice carried the bored impatience of someone who'd already made his decision and was tired of the conversation. "You're just an incompetent academic nerd who doesn't understand business realities. Give yourself and your wife some dignity and accept the inevitable."
He turned toward the door. "Security! Security personnel, come here! Take him away! And the woman in the freezer—she's already dead, don't bother being gentle. Move the equipment to storage. We'll sell it to recoup some of our losses."
"No!" Victor's voice cracked with desperation. "Don't touch my equipment! Don't touch her! She's still alive!"
In the chaos that followed—security guards rushing in, Boyle shouting orders, Victor trying to physically block access to Nora's chamber—Victor acted on pure panic and instinct.
He grabbed a gun from one of the security guards' holsters. Not because he wanted to hurt anyone. Not because he'd planned violence. Just because he needed to make them stop, needed to protect Nora, needed some way to prevent them from taking her away.
He held the weapon tightly like it was his last possible defense, waving it at the approaching crowd, backing toward Nora's chamber with the desperate energy of a cornered animal.
"Stay back! Just stay back! Don't touch her!"
Someone came forward anyway—one of the security guards, trained to disarm threats. He lunged for the gun. Grabbed Victor's wrist.
The two men struggled. Victor wasn't a fighter, had never held a weapon before, had no training or experience.
The gun went off.
The bullet struck the primary refrigeration tank—the central cooling unit that maintained the laboratory's cryogenic systems. Pressurized liquefied gas exploded outward in a catastrophic rupture. The cold current and ice spread rapidly through the entire laboratory, crystallizing everything it touched with terrifying speed.
The security guards saw what was happening and immediately fled, shoving each other out of the door. Boyle ran without looking back, abandoning his equipment and his employee to the flash-freeze event.
Helpless and alone, Victor wrapped his arms around Nora's cryostasis chamber, hugging it tightly as the cold wave engulfed him. He held the container as if it were the most fragile treasure in the world—which it was. It contained his promise to his wife. His entire reason for living.
"Victor, will you continue to stay by my side after I fall asleep?"
"I will never let you go in my life."
The cold air spread with unstoppable force. Large chunks of ice formed, surrounded, submerged, and froze everything in the laboratory. Desks. Equipment. Papers. The ice invaded the corridor outside through the open door. After only ten minutes, the entire floor of the building had transformed into an ice cave—a frozen wasteland of crystallized air and frozen metal.
Victor, at the center of the cryogenic explosion, initially felt the cold as pain—burning, agonizing cold that felt like his body was being torn apart at the molecular level.
Then the pain stopped. He was frozen solid, transformed into a living popsicle, his body temperature dropping to lethal levels.
But just when he was about to lose consciousness entirely—when his brain was shutting down from hypothermia—his physiology underwent a fundamental transformation. Some kind of cellular adaptation triggered by the extreme cold and the exotic chemicals in the cryogenic fluid.
His body suddenly felt... warm? Not hot. But no longer freezing. Comfortable, even, in the sub-zero environment.
Is that Nora? His fading consciousness wondered. Is she hugging me? Keeping me warm?
With such confused thoughts, he fell into unconsciousness.
Before hitting the frozen floor, he saw Nora's cryostasis chamber slip from his hands—his fingers too stiff, his arms too frozen to maintain his grip. The container rolled away across the ice, separating from him.
I'm sorry, he thought. I promised I'd never let you go.
In this way, Dr. Victor Fries was buried in dense ice, his body undergoing transformation from human to something colder.
[Present]
"So when you woke up," Jude said carefully, "you looked like this? The armor was necessary?"
"When I first regained consciousness, I simply discovered that I no longer seemed afraid of low temperatures," Victor replied. "I could move through the ice, could function in sub-zero environments that should have killed me instantly. But I later realized through painful experimentation that I'd completely transformed into something... different. Cold-blooded, essentially. Unable to survive at normal room temperature."
His voice carried bitter irony. "The accident that should have killed me instead made me dependent on cold. I can only live in freezing conditions now. Anything above zero degrees causes severe physical deterioration."
Jude thought for a moment, then offered: "Maybe you could relocate to Antarctica? The environment there would be naturally suitable for your current physiology. No need for the armor in those temperatures."
"It's far too lonely in a place with so few people," Victor said immediately. "Besides, I have to cure Nora. I can't abandon her in some research station at the bottom of the world. She needs to wake up to civilization, not to penguins."
Hearing this, Jude nodded with satisfaction. "In that case, we need to carefully thaw her first. Gradual temperature increase to prevent cellular damage. My treatment process is very fast—it should only take two or three minutes total once she's revived."
Victor frowned, his expression shifting back to distrust and skepticism. "Two or three minutes to cure terminal cancer that defeated every oncologist I've consulted? That's... impossible. You're not making sense."
"Why are you looking at me like that?" Jude asked, genuinely puzzled by the skepticism. He reached into his pocket and pulled out two pieces of candy—one milk-white, one fruit-red. "I didn't say I was a traditional doctor practicing conventional medicine. I work with alternative methods."