Pacific City Chronicles

StahlKorps: The Steel Corps. Nazi Germany had help from many strange quarters as it’s scientists ranged far afield in their search for any means to prevail over their enemies. One of the strangest was the Steinhauer Wormhole, an unstable hyperspacial bridge to the planet Korex, in the Andromeda galaxy. The Korexians were fanatical militaristic expansionists who ruled over 10,000 planets, and who thought the Third Reich had the right idea. Messages and information flowed back and forth, and from this the Nazi science corps was able to build the armored walking machines, the VogelPanzer, (Bird-Tank, called so because the two long legs are reminiscent of a bird’s) and the TotenPanzer (Death-Tank, a massive armored fortress on four legs). At the height of the program, there were almost 200 AusländerMaschines within the Empire. The units were high-maintenance because the builders simply did not understand some of the technologies used. They were capable of tremendous devastation but were also instant targets for any significant metahuman, so they tended to be used mainly as support, propaganda displays, or metahuman exterminations. They led to the development of the later FurchtWaffe, or Weapons of Fear, like Doktor Blud’s Eisenhunds.

JägerGeist (lit. Spirit Hunter). They were the most feared SS special group in Nazi Germany. The atrocities that came to light in 1949 fueled the US witch hunts of the late 1950’s. Composed of telepaths and empaths, the JägerGeists were a law unto themselves even within the SS. Though most were barely powerful enough to reliably read surface thoughts, they learned to link themselves together in series and boost their power exponentially. That technique has never reliably been replicated since that time, and is still a subject of intense research. Many theories have been advanced but so far none have been proven. What is known is that this ability enabled even the weakest empath among them to read and control a person like the strongest psychic. They periodically swept Berlin government buildings for spies and traitors. Those they found were frequently ‘re-educated’ on the spot, turning them into fanatical believers in the Nazi cause.

They became extremely powerful, politically, after Karl Kaiser (aka EisenMaske) became their leader in 1943. In 1944, he attempted a coup but was betrayed by his own second-in-command. He (actually his clone) was publicly lobotomized and the JägerGeist ranks were purged almost to the point of extinction. Kaiser survived the war and re-surfaced in Austria in 1965 as ambassador to Vargastadt, granting him diplomatic immunity to prosecution for his many war crimes. He has devised a means to psychically steal youth from people and has remained young all these years.