Character History for Cape and Cowl

[liebe_krieg]

When the Major was first Ported in, he didn’t exactly advertise his identity as a Nazi war criminal. Cut off from his unit along with all the resources and subordinates he was used to, he spent months posing as a mostly-legitimate security consultant as he struggled to build a base of power. Whenever anyone asked, he said that he was a German officer with a highly classified background who preferred to go by his rank- the truth, except that he was not of the Bundeswehr.

The Major quickly found employment with anti-mutant bigot Cameron Hodge, arranging security and goons for his crusade against Imports. He also made connections with other City supervillains such as Slade, Cavil, Angelica Einstellsehn and Starscream, and became a founding member of the Coalition. This provided the Major with the funds and minions to begin pursuing his real ends. Although he’d been taken away from his planned onslaught on London, the Major still intended to experience the largest war he possibly could. From the moment he first heard about the HIVE, he saw his opportunity to spark the conflict he lived for.

Throughout the spring and summer of 2009 he laid the groundwork for this campaign, making connections and expanding his power. He moved out of the MAC as soon as he could and set up a high-rise apartment/command post. The City gave him a lot to do aside from his planning though, such as singing Springtime For Hitler or revelling at the near-constant violence, especially Godzilla’s final assault. The appearance of his old enemy Alucard in the City was a source of both joy and danger, as he could expose the Major’s charade. The Major kept him occupied with attacks from Bullseye, Deadpool, and even James T. Kirk. The Major also proposed one of the Coalition’s first schemes, arranging for the sale of advanced battle mechs designed by Starscream and Cavil to North Korea. In addition to making the villains millions, he hoped to heighten international tensions by changing the balance of military power. Gundam pilots put an end to these hopes when they assaulted the base the mechs were being developed at and utterly destroyed them.

By August, the Major was ready to unveil his grand plan. His proposal to the City argued for a pre-emptive strike against the HIVE, which he claimed posed a massive and imminent threat both to the City and the world. His warmongering was met with no small amount of opposition, but he was still able to gather a force of over fifty ImPorts to join his offensive. Using teleporters and a hijacked HIVE airship they were able to penetrate into the heart of enemy territory before a bloody battle erupted. The City’s fighters took casualties while damage to HIVE forces and civilians was heavy. During the battle Tony Stark’s team breached a research lab, discovering and destroying a Porter copy under development. It’s possible that the Major’s deranged crusade neutralized at least one great danger.

The raid was a Pyrrhic victory for the Major. He was wounded in the battle, which exposed his nature as a cyborg for all to see. Launching this private war had attracted no small amount of suspicion, and the investigations of the veteran Nazi-puncher known as ‘The Lobster’ confirmed that the Major had to have been around during World War Two. His international arms dealing was also exposed after the battle, and the Major was arrested and sent to the super-prison, then under the control of GLaDOS.

This was not too great a setback for him, since one of his subordinates from home was now present: Warrant Officer Schrodinger, whose quantum teleportation allowed him unlimited access to the prison while making him basically invulnerable. With Schrodinger smuggling messages, the Major was able to stay in contact with his allies during his stay- and arrange his next plan. The rest of the fall passed uneventfully while the Major dabbled in psychoanalysis and legal representation.

At the start of December, the Major leaped into sudden action. He had made a deal with GLaDOS to compromise the prison’s security in exchange for arranging the delivery of Tony Stark, who the AI had an interest in. A force of mercenaries was able to storm the complex by surprise and free the Major along with several other prisoners, while many of the prison’s staff became hostages. The Major addressed the City, making his demands while inviting more supervillains to join him in his takeover. Each supervillain who joined him resulted in new demands being made. The situation escalated rapidly, as Tony Stark surrendered himself in exchange for hostages being released and as a ploy to discover how the prison’s security was compromised. Torture ensued. When Maleficent, Mistress of All Evil demanded that princes and princesses surrender themselves, many of the City’s royal Imports tried to surrender themselves in the same way, only to be interrupted by their friends and a furious Elisa Maza. Meanwhile, Aldo Raine and John McClane remained at large in the prison, mocking the Major over the radio while killing Nazis and generally being awesome. Things got even more complicated when one of the Major’s collaborators, the Joker, turned on his allies out of a demented sense of patriotism and tried to blow the prison sky-high.

As quickly as it had developed, the hostage situation ended when the heroes, fed up with the terrorists’ crap, stormed the place. Many of the Major’s mercenaries tried to flee, to no avail. The Major himself was about to give the order for the remaining hostages to be executed when he was interrupted by McClane and Raine. Cornered, the Nazi warlord tried to bluff his way out. It didn’t work, and Aldo shot him many, many, many times in the face. All the hostages were saved

Yet even as he died, the Major had won. While the battle was raging Schrodinger was outside of the City acquiring the real objective, the thing the entire prison takeover was a distraction for: a nuclear warhead.

At this time death for Imports resulted in lost memories upon resurrection, and the Major’s death carried a very heavy price: he completely forgot every experience of the Second World War up until 1944, the best and most important years of his life. This was a deeply felt loss for him. Nonetheless, he secured a new base, recruited new allies, and forged ahead with his next master plan: Operation Gotterdammerung. He also attended one of the more hideous parties the City has had.

During the spring of 2010, a new name appeared on the streets of the City, connected to hatred and murder: ‘New Millennium.’ The actions of a few members led to the Major’s new army of neo-Nazi thugs being exposed sooner than he had planned, but by this time it was too late. A chance encounter led to vampire police officer Aaron Grey falling into the Major’s hands, which led to torture, mad science, and the creation of vampire soldiers. The Major also abducted James Bond for the specific purpose of gloating about his master plan: the entire point of Gotterdammerung was to create the perception that the heroes had been given every chance to stop him.

Many a supervillain had accused superheroes of caring more about each other than the people they were supposed to protect. Gotterdammerung attempted to prove this accusation, and in doing so, bring forth Armageddon. Having failed to spark war between the City and the HIVE, he would now try to create conflict between natives and Imports by using the nuclear warhead Schrodinger had stolen on Washington D.C. while giving the impression that the superheroes had let the attack proceed because they were preoccupied with their own concerns. The result would surely be an escalation into violence.

In April of 2010 the Major transformed over a hundred heavily-armed New Millennium members into vampires, re-acquired the airship he’d used to attack the HIVE, and recruited an absurd number of supervillains. The villains were transported to Washington, and the Major posted to show the bomb planted and counting down in the National World War Two Memorial, seconds before he launched missile and vampire attacks against Import locations across the City. The idea was that the heroes would defend themselves and their loved ones and not the government of the people who had hated and feared them, and that after the nation’s capital went radioactive those people would lash out in rage.

It was a complete failure. The Major had completely misread and underestimated his opponents and his forces were routed in both locations. New Millennium was wiped out, the airship was destroyed, and the bomb was punted into space by Superman after Juston Seyfert turned its timer into a wristwatch. For his first Cityversary, the Major himself had his jaw broken and was sent back to jail, rendered unable to speak for quite some time.

The defeat of his master plan didn’t discourage the Major anymore than being mute did, especially after more people from his world arrived. As another conflict with the HIVE approached he busied himself while in jail by preparing an absurd defense plan for the City, which was roundly rejected. He also retained many contacts, and a fateful prison visit by M’stra gave him the idea for his next attack. First he would have to escape though, and his deeply-beloved War took care of that for him in the style he liked best: flat-out violence. A smash-and-grab operation by his allies and subordinates busted him out of prison in May. His mansion had been compromised after James Bond’s escape, and so the Major retreated to his newest lair, an underground bunker fashioned from an old bomb shelter.

He was just in time for more conflict, as the situation with the HIVE escalated throughout the summer. When Imports got directly involved in the battle of Los Angeles, the Major dispatched his subordinates to help add to the carnage. Jan Valentine perished in the fighting, and so the Major counted the deployment as successful. It was around this time that the Major discovered that Soundwave, who he had counted as one of his most dependable allies, had been responsible for the failure of Operation Gotterdammerung. Revenge took the form of planting a bomb inside the Decepticon’s chest, and Soundwave has not returned since. The murder drove a permanent wedge between the Nazis and the Decepticons, especially Shockwave. The feud has been ongoing since then, splitting the Coalition and at one point featuring to an old-school gang brawl in a junkyard. Shockwave’s revenge included getting Alastair to hack the Major’s files, expose several of his older secrets, and replace everything with cat pictures.

By the time the flames died down in California the Major was already well on his way to preparing Operation Skorzeny. Once again he recruited fellow supervillains to aid him. With Alpha and the Master, he set up modified Dollhouse technology in an office building nicknamed the ‘Drone Domicile’. In September, he began kidnapping ImPorts to this location and brainwashing them into acting as his agents. Skorzeny was a great success at first: about 20 ImPorts became unwilling subordinates to the Major and his allies, particularly Slade, who masterminded a fear gas scheme while controlling Dick Grayson that added even more to the confusion and paranoia the Major was attempting to sow. Without a doubt, the high point of the operation was the assassination of police Commissioner Elisa Maza by sleeper agent Yusuke Urameshi. Confident of success, the Major ordered the abduction of Seras Victoria, intending to create a new vampire army by subjecting her to torturous experiments.

Once again, the Major overestimated the loyalty of his allies and underestimated the strength of his enemies. Angelica Einstellsehn had been a collaborator of his since he arrived in the City, but she had her own agenda which involved convincing the City that she had successfully reformed by revealing the location of the Drone Domicile to the police. At the same time, the Major’s gloating provoked Seras into a berserker rage. Breaking free of her restraints, she damaged one of the Master’s devices that had been keeping the lair hidden. The ensuing fight saw the Major captured by Shockwave, who was eager for some retaliatory torture.

In a stroke of luck that probably proves there is no justice in the universe, the Major was Ported out after only a few days of Shockwave’s tender mercies. By the time he was Ported back in he had seen the culmination of his life’s work back home: London destroyed, Alucard defeated, all his subordinates dead in glorious battle, he himself dying exactly the way he had hoped to. So he was in high spirits when he returned to the City in November and found that the last of his brainwashing victims, Ysera the dream dragon, had been triggered by his absence to trap half the City in their own worst nightmares as a last goodbye from the Nazi warlord. Yet this too was a failure, and the Major went back to the drawing board once more in his bunker, forging new alliances while dealing with Ysera’s revenge: constant, terrible nightmares involving world peace. In December, the Major discovered Einstellsehn’s duplicity- ironically thanks to one of Shockwave’s schemes- and she’s been on his shit list ever since.

The Major started 2011 with a ridiculous streak of luck that lends powerful support to the ‘no justice’ theory. First, the lantern festival restored his lost memories of World War Two. Second, a failsafe plan by Cavil bequeathed a large amount of modified nerve gas to the Major when the Cylon was Ported out. This ‘hate gas’ would serve as the key to the Major’s next plan. Finally, he made it possible for the vampire Spike to get a chip out of his head that had rendered him harmless, and Spike repaid him by once again giving the Major Nazi vampires to play with.

In February and March, the Major made his next attempt at fomenting conflict. He’d learned somewhat from past defeats, and did not open up this plan to potentially-treacherous allies, instead relying on Beatrice and mercenaries. He also decided to distract the heroes with assassinations and false evidence trails. This play was spectacularly successful, as Bakura’s unplanned death triggered a very helpful rampage by Alastair. It also backfired spectacularly: the Major hadn’t bothered to tell Beatrice about his plans, and didn’t know that two of his targets were people she cared about.

Nonetheless, the Golden Witch began helping the Major distribute the gas throughout the City from an abandoned community theatre that served as the base for this latest operation. The Nazi intended to drive the City into chaos, then flee the country with the gas and his vampires to go on a tour of global conflict zones, leaving bloodshed in his wake. The gas caused many fights between Imports and an outbreak of rioting, but before the Major could make good his escape Bucky and the Question hijacked one of his trucks, drove it through the door of the theatre, and beat the crap out of him. The Major was thwarted again but this time was incarcerated at the Norman Osborn Hospital of Psychiatric Evaluation- courtesy of Boyd Langton, who had been gunning for the Major ever since Operation Skorzeny misappropriated the Dollhouse’s technology.

Keeping with the theme of the Major’s inability to sustain alliances, Beatrice then massacred several of his precious vampire soldiers as payback for Bakura. The two have since made a shaky and probably temporary reconciliation, while the remaining vampires are staying in the Major’s bunker, laying low and feeding on animal blood while they wait for their leader’s return. In the meantime, the Major indulged his artistic side with a musical performance that can only be described as unforgettable.

After languishing in the asylum for a number of months, the Major was recommended for an experimental treatment with the Rossum Corporation. Unknown to NoHOPE staff, Boyd Langton really planned to torment the Major's brain into serving as a component of Rossum's mainframe. The mental torture was extreme, and left the Major in a near-death coma. Langton ordered the body disposed of and covered up the incident, not knowing the Major was still alive.

The Major made the most out of his 'death.' He struck a deal with the Dolvanian government through their consulate in the City: breeding a vampire army for them in return for their sponsorship. The Major was provided with a secret island base, personnel, funds, and discretion to pursue his own goals while he served as the Dolvanian catspaw. Adopting the alias of 'Thousand,' he was able to run his schemes anonymously. He began by arranging for the destruction of a StarkTech factory, then got his revenge on Boyd Langton by orchestrating a scandal for his companies. He also got involved in the race for the Cyber Key Shards. It couldn't last forever though, and 'Thousand' was eventually exposed by Magneto's investigation.

Brought back into the public eye, the Major arranged for his magical return to the City from his Pacific base. He then sponsored a summit of supervillainy at the close of the year to breed new conflict for 2012. Arrangements made at this meeting allowed him to engage in smuggling cells of his steadily-growing array of Nazi vampires around the world. However, this plan was quickly exposed. As a side project, the Major has established an odd rapport with Pink Floyd, a musician with a remarkable talent for inciting and directing crowds as well as an interest in fascism.

The Sturmbahnfuhrer of the Last Battalion has truly come a long way since he arrived in the City with nothing but his wits and sidearm to work with. Repeated failure has not kept him from being one of the City’s most persistent threats, and he has no intention of ever giving up on his dreams of the war he loves so deeply.