The obvious horror-conflict for Genius is "things man was not meant to know". Your player characters seek knowledge, driven by some inner fear or furious desire. Obsessed with uncovering the truth, with developing some new cure or unveiling a brilliant discovery, they become blinded to the fact that their means cannot justify their end... and though the secrets they uncover through their studies may offer them great power and insight, they may be secrets better left unknown. This is the story of Frankenstein, of the Time Traveller, of Doctor Jekyll, of Crawford Tillinghast.
Unfortunately, this is also the story of Mage: The Awakening, a gameline that Genius tries to shit over while desperately aping a different Mage game about how ideas have tremendous power and ignoring self-imposed limitations can let you change the world.
Yeah, if I was making a Mad Scientist game... Well, Mages have access to broad secret wisdom, so Mad Scientists shouldn't. They're not wizards, they don't have the ability to keep pulling out new tricks.
I would instead use something like Skinchangers have, where you have a point buy system you use at the start to build your Pioneer's discovery. So if you're Doctor Jakyll, your discovery, no Discovery because we're making a WoD game and need extra nouns, your Discovery a system of drugs that unlock hidden or alternative aspects of the self, transforming and empowering you. You would develop your Discovery with Innovations, but it would remain a focused thematic technology.
At the same time, while you are a Trailblazer, you sharing your Discovery is stopped or held back by Pitfalls, unique flaws that plague Pioneers that turn the world against their research, burying and destroying their work if let run wild. So Doctor Jakyll's pitfall is that his system of drugs unleashes ultimately self-destructive aspects of self. Mr. Freeze's pitfall is that his work in cryogenics ultimately creates an alien ice world, and adapts people to it - exiling them from ours.
Exiles are the minor attached splat - they're people who have followed a Mad Scientist out of the normal world, and so are plagued by their Pitfall, without the insight or ability to innovate. So if Mr. Freeze saves someones life with his technology, he'll have to be careful and limit it's use, or his subject will become an Exile, who can't live in a world of human warmth anymore. But there's a way to keep yourself from turning into an Exile, you can follow Giovanni Guasconti and repudiate the Mad Scientist who touched your life, becoming his enemy and undermining his work. Becoming a reactionary can save you.
It shouldn't be clear if Mad Scientists are changing reality, accessing some alternative zone, or actually discovering something. Maybe they make their inventions possible, or maybe they were always possible, but some force (the universal unconsciousness?) guides people away from dangerous paths. Their version of Ascension isn't personal, it's called Validation, and it means they've blazed the trail that can be brought it back to mankind, becoming a Prometheus like figure with the fire of knowledge... but they don't get to be the ones to share it with the world. A Validated Pioneer disappears, and then all around the world people start discovering or deducing the principles he's researched.
I wouldn't put in a direct rage system, but a frustrated Pioneer can use his pitfall as a weapon. When Dr. Freeze is stopped from saving his wife, and she's locked forever in an icy sleep, he can rage against the world, and purposefully use his technology as a weapon. Except... except you don't get validated then, or at least it gets a lot harder. You need to bring people into your world to Validate it. When you start using your medical Innovation to make Freeze Rays, well it's safe to say that everyone you touch will become a Giovanni, and work to destroy you and blot your accomplishments from history, to make it as if you never were.
) and how she might do that.
