Teaser Tuesday #115

Ed ecco di nuovo la rubrica settimanale Teaser Tuesday, creata dal blog Should Be Reading, che si divide in poche, semplici fasi:
1_ prendi il libro che stai leggendo
2_ apri una pagina a caso
3_ scrivi un breve brano (stando attenti a non spoilerare)
4_ scrivi titolo e autore

Baron Ether is old. He lost an eye fighting Paragon, and replaced it with a mechanical device of his own construction. Whatever gave him his original superpowers has moslty faded, except in the eloganted shape of his skull and a coal-like glow behind his remaining eye. He's an old man - no one really knows how old - and he's been a villain a long, long time. He started out robbing railroads. He fought Victorian adventurers and American whiz kids, wore a mustache and carried a trick cane whose jeweled head bulged with concealed gadgetry.
In the late 1940s, he came to America and founded the first League of Evil. He fought the Super Squadron long before I did, even cruised the timestream and fought the SS three thousand centuries from now. One time, he threw in with his own alternate-dimensional self to steal a fortune in gold, only to cheat his double out of the proceeds. Classic
In the fifties, he blazed a trail of infamy. He did it all, robbed the Freedom Force of their memory, swapped bodies with them, cloned himself. Lost one set of power and gained another, was set adrift in time and spent six years in the Cretaceous before building his own time machine. He came back from that one twenty years younger, a side effect of the chronon particles.
In the sixties he reinvented himself again as a Mephistophelian master of illusion, and stayed out of prison for a while. As recently as 1978, they thought they'd seen the last of him, when a stolen space shuttle disappeared into the void, outbound from the plane of the ecliptic at a perilous angle. But a year later he returned, only to be defeated again in the waning days of Carter presidency. But he never lost his penache - by the end, he was using hardware with gears and brass fittings against mutants with fusion-powered hardware.
 - Soon I will be invincible, Austin Grossman