Star Harbor Nights

The Webmistress runs a global network for the collection of useful information and interesting objects. What she doesn't know, she can find out... what she doesn't have, she can get. She lives like a queen, commanding the absolute loyalty of her army of thugs who are kept under her thrall through a mixture of intimidation, sex, drugs, and mental conditioning.

The Toymakers Syndicate is a consortium of villains who specialize in mind control technology that effectively turns superheroes (or anybody else, hypothetically) into puppets. The name comes from one of their many front companies. Whether they've bothered to give a name to their criminal alliance is unknown.

Rhyme is the daughter of the superheroine Grace and her lover the detective Reason, as well as the fraternal half-triplet of the Wisdom Twins, which always made her the odd one out growing up, even if her sisters did nothing to overtly exclude her. Where exactly Rhyme started going wrong is a matter of debate, though considering just how twisted she is, it's likely not any one thing but a lengthy succession of them. The death of her parents (and the increasingly hostile view the public took to their unconventional family) pushed Rhyme to the brink... her subsequent exposure to the undiluted Waters of Youth drove her right over it, as well as making her damn close to immortal.

They're here from the government, and they're here to help. Officially, Department 4B acts as an intermediary between superheroes and the government, and superheroes and the public. Unofficially... well, nobody's quite sure what they're up to unofficially. It's likely even within the organization there are so many plots and counterplots going on that the left hand isn't sure what the twenty-third tentacle is doing.

Pseudo-occult posers, or something more? The Bone Lords are a cult/gang with a serious death fixation. No one's ever managed to find any historical precedent for the symbols and language they use in their "religious ceremonies", and for a long time none of their rituals were seen to have any appreciable effect. That changed the night that one of their lieutenants, Bloodhound, successfully completed "the Rites of Bone" and transformed into a skeletal monstrosity in front of two very surprised heroes. Bloodhound was seemingly destroyed, but the full ramifications of this development have not yet been seen.

"Portalien" is the name given to an alien race that sent an automated probe to earth many thousands of years ago, programmed to use the ambient technology to construct a series of gigantic portals ("portal" + "alien" = "Portalien") through which their ground forces could invade. Of course, the native technology being what it was thousands of years ago, they didn't make much immediate progress. The original Portalien robots were able to replicate themselves crudely using clockwork gears and steam power, and secretly provided scientific guidance to many emerging earth cultures in order to achieve their ultimate goal. Their plan eventually culiminated in the Portal Wars of the 1980s.

 Though the aliens themselves were repeled and the portals destroyed, remnants of their probes still exist, rebuilding their forces for the next attempt. Portalien probes (usually referred to simply as Portaliens, as the actual biological race has rarely been encountered, even during the Wars) range from tiny toy-like 'bots tinkered together from spare parts (sometimes referred to as "gear gnomes" or "gremlins") to giant, city-striding mechanical monsters.

Carapace is the name used by various men who've piloted a black beetle-like mechsuit, directed against the citizens of Nebula City. It's been theorized that these attacks are little more than tests of experimental prototypes. The designer of the armor remains a mystery, as does its ultimate purpose.