Duty Call...The Father

Name: Oskar Stendt

Alias: The Father, Padre, Minister, Reverend, Preacher, Pastor, or Abbot.

Location: Occupied Europe

Group Affiliation: Axis Forces-SS

Origin: Oskar Stendt was born in the alpine town of Bruneck, South Tirol in the Alps of Austria (now Italy). He was the oldest of a half dozen children raised by a discipline-minded father who hauled supplies over dangerous mountain passes between nearby towns. Oskar joined the Austrian army at the outbreak of the Great War. Because of his alpine experience he was transferred to a special alpine unit, the Kaiserjäger.

WWI- the Kaiserjäger participated in a battle near Scharnitz Pass that lasted over six months. The Italians were well dug in along the eastern facing slopes and the Austrian rifle regiment was ordered to root them out. Shearing winds and frigid temperatures stalemated the warring units for months until Colonel Karl Michl devised an ingenious assault plan: he would send a small unit of highly trained men to climb to the mountain top and lower explosives with ropes. The resulting explosion would either kill the Italians outright or trap them underneath tons of rock, debris, and snow. Oskar was chosen for the squad and he performed brilliantly. He climbed higher than any of his fellow soldiers and was able to set up ropes above their intended targets. A series of signal flares was used to initiate the attack. At dawn on the fateful day, Oskar lowered the last explosives into place and set off the charges. The Italians were totally annihilated and when the Austrian infantrymen stormed the complex they could not find a single defender alive. With the stubborn Italian soldiers out of the way, the Austrians were free to continue the War in Ice and Snow throughout the winter season. As Oskar climber down from his perch above the valley, he could not find the other members of the squad; they had been buried by a secondary avalanche that was triggered by his attack. Overcome with remorse, he made his way back to the Kaiserjäger base camp. After a debriefing, he was hailed as a hero by the other members of his regiment and quickly promoted. Now a well respected officer, He was assigned to lead another attack, even higher and farther, but before the assault could begin an internal struggle ensued in the command tent of Colonel Michl. The medical officer attached to the regiment rescinded the order to send Oskar and his hand-picked men; the lack of oxygen from the incredibly high altitudes of the Alps would surely kill the soldiers before they could ever make it to their target. Colonel Michl demanded that Oskar and his men leave at once with the explosives. Their target: the entrance to the extensive fortifications and military headquarters of the enemy. Doctor Hoekell pleaded with the colonel to reconsider, even delay the attack for at least one day until he could retrieve an experimental drug that could help the men. The determined colonel relented and the men of the assault team were eventually inoculated with a drug that increased the oxygen levels within their blood to levels that would allow them to traverse the inhospitable terrain. The enhanced blood treatment had a component of Protein Zero, an experimental drug designed to create super soldiers for the Kaiser. Days into their climb Oskar realized that the drug was a success. His men felt strong and their strength was exhilarating. When they arrived at their target, Oskar’s men could see guns being dragged by hundreds of troops up the mountain slopes, a network of streets, cable cars, mountain railways, and walkways supported by the steepest of walls hand carved into the mountainside; they had to succeed. The explosives were lowered under the cover of a thick storm and low hanging cloud cover. They were laid, detonated, and the command entrance and its supporting road was demolished. As Oskar’s men made their way back, the storm thickened and visibility reduced to zero. The men had to feel their way along steep slopes, some falling to their deaths silently in the howling wind. Oskar became lost and disorientated, but the drug within his blood kept his strength up, which fed his spirit. He carried on until a miss-step plunged him into a deep crevasse. There he fell asleep, injured and unconscious, buried alive in a glacier within the Alps

Villa St. Raphael-

WWII- Oskar was indoctrinated into the SS during a ceremony at Wewelsburg, a castle which was a ritual headquarters of Himmler’s SS.

Powers:

Description:

Duty Call...Kreigeist!

Kriegeist (War Ghost)

Name: Helmut Heller

Location: Germany

Group Affiliation: Axis Forces-SS

Powers: Kriegeist is able to exude fumes of mustard gas from his skin. He has no control over these gasses, they constantly seep from his pores, surrounding him in an aura of poison. The man’s flesh has withered to a point where he is almost nothing more than a skeleton and its touch is lethal. Kriegeist’s touch can corrode living matter like acid, eating away at tissue, cloth or wood rapidly. The monster’s body is largely composed of poison, conferring on him an immunity to almost any form of toxin. He is also immune to pain, the pain centers in his brain having been burned out by his constant agony.

Kriegeist was an experienced and combat-hardened veteran even before joining the SS. Since falling under the command of Himmler, he has undergone even more training, becoming the Nazis’ top assassin. Kriegeist is a master in the arts of stealth and murder, most of his victims never even see him, killed by the poison gas he exudes before they are even aware he is there.

History: Helmut was a soldier in WWI, fighting for Kaiser and country. For four years, he served in the bloody quagmire of the western front. Then, the stalemate was finally broken, the Imperial German army forced to concede that the wind of war was now blowing against it. Armistice was coming. The carnage would soon end. The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month would see the end of hostilities. One man who did not share in the jubilation was Helmut’s commander, Hauptmann Erich Ritter. Despite his years on the front, Hauptmann Ritter was not content merely with his survival, nor the officer’s rank he had attained. Ritter had chest pains, pains that would only leave him when an Iron Cross was pinned to his breast.

Before the armistice could take effect, Ritter organized his command for one last, audacious assault on the enemy lines. Horrified, his men still followed the orders of their commander and his desperate gamble to win his medal before the war was over. Muttering prayers beneath their breath, Helmut and his comrades climbed from their trench one last time, charging toward the French lines as their captain commanded. The French reacted with panic as they saw the German assault rushing across no-man’s land. With few soldiers manning the trenchline, the French called artillery support to break the German attack before it could reach them. The artillery teams unloaded everything they had into the advancing Germans, including a motley collection of gas shells left over from four years of deadlock. Ritter’s assault was smashed under the barrage, the Hauptmann and a handful of survivors all that survived to retreat back to their own trenches.

The chemical cocktail floating over no-man’s land finally dissipated a few days after the armistice was signed. French soldiers began to scour the devastation to bury the dead before the corpses could spread disease. They were amazed to find a survivor among the mangled dead of the last German assault. In one of the shell craters, where a thin mist of gas still lingered, they found Helmut Heller. The German’s uniform was all but corroded from his body, his flesh pitted with ugly burns, his face little more than a withered skull. If not for the screams, no one would have believed the man still lived. One of the French troopers raised his rifle to put the German out of his misery, but the officer leading the patrol stayed his hand. Helmut should be dead, but he wasn’t, and why he wasn’t was something the officer was certain would be worth knowing. He ordered Helmut taken back behind the lines to a field station. Donning gas masks, the soldiers tried to recover Helmut’s screaming body, but the first man to touch him was soon screaming himself, the skin seared from his hand by contacting Helmut’s flesh. Finally chains were used to pull Helmut out and drag him back to the field hospital where the horrified doctors could examine him and try to figure out how the German had survived.

For the next ten years, Helmut Heller was passed between different hospitals in France, as the finest medical minds in the Republic tried to figure out what had happened to him. The German’s body had been saturated with an insane amount of poison gas, a cocktail of lethal proportions that should have killed him as it had the rest of his comrades. Instead, the combination of poisons had altered him on some metabolic level. His flesh had an almost acidic quality to it, corroding almost anything it touched on contact. Even more disturbing, he exuded a lethal gas from the pores in his skin, a deadly fume not unlike the mustard gas that had, in part, caused his condition. When he wasn’t sedated, Helmut was screaming, his every nerve afire with the hideous damage his body had suffered. The doctors monitoring him tried to console themselves that there was no mentality behind Helmut’s screams, that his suffering had rendered the man a vegetable.

In 1928, the screaming stopped.

A new nurse had been appointed to feed Helmut. Because of the horror of attending the man, staff was frequently changed as nurses and physicians suffered breakdowns. Due to his vegetative state, and the fact that anything edible would corrode when he touched it, Helmut was fed intravenously. The nurse had been attending Helmut for only a few weeks, but she had reached her limit. It was cruel, unthinkable to force a man to go on like this, to prolong his suffering. There was a point when death was kinder than life. Instead of Helmut’s food, she prepared a solution of cyanide, injecting it into the suffering man’s body. When Helmut grew quiet and still, the nurse felt relief. When he opened his eyes and rose from his bed, she knew horror. The cyanide had not killed the man, instead all the poison had done was kill the pain centers in his brain. Without agony burning through his brain, Helmut’s mind returned. And it was devoted toward a single purpose.

Hauptmann Ritter never did earn his Iron Cross. After the war, he returned to his home in Bavaria, becoming a clockmaker. He led a quiet, mostly content life, never giving too much thought to his brief military career during the war. That was in the past, and no good could come from dwelling on the past. Ritter was more concerned with the political turmoil broiling within the Weimar Republic, the armed militias of Fascists and Communists prowling the streets and their often violent clashes. It was not so long ago that the NSDAP had tried to seize control of Munich and oust the Bavarian government in a coup. The future was uncertain and frightening enough without worrying about the ghosts of his past.

Then, one night, Ritter discovered that his past wasn’t quite so dead as he had hoped. He had read in the papers accounts of strange animal mutilations, and even more bizarre reports of a ghastly ‘gas man’ prowling the countryside, but hadn’t believed them. A morbid sideshow to distract people from the uncertain political climate, that was all it was. At least so he thought, until he returned home and found his wife lying dead on the kitchen floor, her body twisted and contorted in a manner he’d seen often during the war – the tell-tale residue of mustard gas! Ritter was still reeling from this hideous discovery when a voice called his name, a croaking whisper that seemed at once inhuman yet familiar. The ex-captain turned, only to have a withered hand close around his throat. Poison fumes filled his lungs as the lethal touch of his attacker began to eat through his flesh. Helmut Heller was disappointed when life passed from Ritter. It had all been over far too quickly.

For a time, after the murder of Ritter and his wife, Helmut wandered the back alleys of Munich, trying to avoid discovery even as he desperately tried to find sustenance. It was no easy thing, food would rot as soon as he touched it, providing him only the faintest wisp of nourishment as he tried to devour the burning residue. In time, his hunger became too ravenous, overcoming his caution. He became careless, and when he was careless, people died. Soon the Munich police were scouring the city for him, finally deciding that reports of a ‘gas man’ were more than twisted fantasy. However, it was not the police who found Helmut Heller. It was the stormtroopers of the NSDAP, the Nazis.

Himmler himself had been paying keen attention to reports of Helmut’s activities, always drawn to the bizarre and occult, the head of the Nazi SS had followed the accounts of a ‘gas man’ avidly. He turned his organization toward the purpose of tracking down this strange, spectral creature. Himmler was somewhat disappointed when he saw the ghastly, almost skeletal Helmut. He had imagined the ‘gas man’ would be some superhuman pinnacle of Aryan vitality, one of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch. Instead he found a grotesque monstrosity, the toxic ruin of a man. Still, even if Helmut couldn’t be paraded around as an example of the Nazi ideal, Himmler recognized that his unique abilities could still the party.

Helmut Heller became the Kriegeist, the arch-assassin of the Nazis and was soon deployed against the enemies of the Party, both within and without. Papers across Germany began to report the strange, horrible deaths of prominent communists – a wave of killings that filled the hearts of the Reds with dread. Outspoken critics of the Nazis in the press began to turn up dead, judges and lawmakers who tried to curb the Nazi movement’s excesses likewise began to drop like flies. Trying to oppose the rising power of Hitler invited strange and ghastly death.

For his part in helping the Nazis, Himmler arranged a supply of the intravenous food Kriegeist needs to truly sate his hunger and keep himself alive. Although Kriegeist has become an ardent and loyal Nazi (the party has provided him with both a home and a purpose, things Helmut thought he would never have again after becoming a monster), Himmler takes no chances with him. Kriegeist’s food is carefully rationed, making him dependent on the SS to keep him supplied. To further increase that dependency, Himmler has had portions of heroin added to the protein sludge Kriegeist is fed. By controlling the food, Himmler controls the man, and that control makes the Gestapo chief sleep easier at night. Because he knows better than anyone the abilities of his assassin, and they terrify him.

Description: Kriegeist is a thin, withered shell of a man. His skin is pitted and scarred, his flesh shrunken almost to the bone. A thick yellowish vapour surrounds him as mustard gas seeps from his body. Most times, Kriegeist will be found wearing a special suit crafted form him by the SS which acts to contain his poisonous body. This suit is made of thick rubber and crafted to resemble a German army uniform. A gasmask and stahlhelm cover Kriegeist’s head and face, while the heavy metal vest of a WWI trenchraider covers his chest, providing added protection from small arms fire in the unlikely event one of Kriegeist’s victims sees him coming. The assassin compliments his natural abilities with a selection of grenades, knives and his trust Mauser pistol.

Roll Call...Johnny Dingo!

Johnny Dingo

Name: Evan Aberthol

Location: British army soldier

Group Affiliation: The IMPERIALS

Powers: Johnny Dingo is a fifth generation werewolf, able to change his shape from that of a human being into a half-animal monster. As a werewolf, Johnny Dingo is much stronger and faster than a human, and possesses exceedingly keen senses of smell and hearing. The werewolf’s claws are able to tear through sheet metal like tissue and its jaws able to snap through bone. The strange, supernatural metabolism of a werewolf makes Johnny Dingo immune to many normally lethal weapons, but highly vulnerable to those forces that attack his unnatural substance – fire, certain herbs such as wolfsbane and rose flowers and especially anything crafted from silver. Even in his human state, Johnny Dingo retains traces of his werewolf state, his reflexes are abnormally keen and he continues to exhibit unnatural senses of smell and hearing.

History: The Aberthol family can trace its roots back into the misty ages of legend. And for as far back as the line can be traced, theirs has been a cursed lineage and more than one of the family has found his end upon a gallows. The men of the family have been characterized as violent and intemperate, unable and unwilling to abide the restraints of society. There were always rumors about them as well, dark stories which were almost beyond belief, tales that were too fantastic to be believed. However, in the early 1800’s, an English magistrate took it into his hands to put a stop to the stories about what was responsible for dead livestock and missing animals in his district. Gawl Aberthol, the last of the line, was arrested following a drunken brawl in a local pub. The magistrate availed himself of the opportunity to remove the source of the bogey stories that had beset his community for generations. By order of the judge, Gawl was sentenced to the penal colony of Australia.

In Australia, however, Gawl soon escaped and set about taking a family and making a new life for himself in the Australian outback. The wide-open spaces of Australia soothed him in a way the increasingly industrialized and crowded environs of England could not. For the beast that lurked inside Gawl, that emerged each time the moon was full to hunt and howl needed such open vastness in which to prowl.

Evan Aberthol is the great-great grandson of Gawl. Like his ancestors, he too is marked with the sign of the beast. Like them, he was a violent and intemperate man, the spirit of the wolf clouding his every judgement, making him lash out with no thought of restraint or consequence. All that changed, however, when he, like Gawl, found himself in a barroom brawl. Unlike Gawl, however, Evan killed his antagonist, an aborigine labourer. The courts ruled the tragedy a death by misadventure, since the aborigine had instigated the fight. But the dead man’s fellow tribesmen saw things otherwise. The aborigine had confronted Evan over the killing of numerous sheep on the ranch where he worked, killings the werewolf was responsible for. The tribe’s shaman determined that Evan should understand what he had done, employing his tribal magics to open up Evan’s mind, removing the cloud that separated the beast from the man. Unlike his forefathers, the deeds of the werewolf would no longer be foggy dreams at the edge of Evan’s memory. He would know everything the monster did, everything for which he himself was ultimately responsible. It was a terrible punishment and something Evan found himself tormented by ceaselessly. He took to locking himself in a heavy iron box when the moon rose, trying to keep the beast from working any harm.

As time went on, however, Evan found that there was another change coming upon him as a result of the spell. More and more, he found his own personality and mind rising into awareness within the shape of the monster. He found that he could control the werewolf and even will himself to change forms. It took intense concentration and will power to keep the beast in check, but Evan knew that only by such efforts could he ever hope to face life again. His own personality experienced a change, losing the selfish impulses that had been the driving motivations of his entire life, the impulses that were not unlike the hungry urges of the werewolf. Instead, Evan was determined to do some good for his fellow man, to atone for all the hurt and horror his family had caused over the years. When the fires of war began to engulf the globe, Evan offered his services and unique powers to his government, becoming Johnny Dingo.

Description: Evan Aberthol is a tall, broad-shouldered man with a powerful build and a sharp, narrow face. As Johnny Dingo, he is a lean, hungry shape, his body covered in light, sandy fur (matching Aberthol’s blonde hair) with his face stretched into the fanged muzzle of an enormous wolf. In both forms, Johnny Dingo wears the khaki uniform of an Australian infantryman, modified to stretch and expand when Aberthol’s body metamorphoses into the werewolf