Jump 439: Wolfenstein: The New Order

Jump #439: Wolfenstein: The New Order
>Five of Pentacles (Worry), reversed: Impending physical threat is met with calm and skill.
>Age: 25
>Location: Free Choice, 1942
>Identity: Resistance
>Drawbacks: (+300) Early Start, Golden Age
>Secret Thieves (700)
Reverse engineering in general is good, but reverse engineering anything, even several thousands of years advanced? That's some next-level kind of work. If only I had works to reverse engineer...
>Wolf In Sheep's Skin (Free, Resistance)
Well, it never hurts to be proficient with disguises, no?
>Taking Out The Foundations (400, Resistance)
This is actually pretty neat. Amplifying the effects of anything I do in terms of sabotaging an organization? I can see a LOT of use for this in my future.
>Da’at Yichud Library (0)
Well. It certainly appears that I have works to reverse engineer now. Even if much of it is redundant, some is unique, and rather neat at that.

You know what I like when it comes to World War II? I have a ready-made solution that works every time I want to deal with such a war that can be adopted with minimal training and not a lot of retooling. Plans smuggled out to the Allies by the resistance against Vichy France, plans that looked like they came from the lab of a mad genius. Five meter tall suits, closer to power armor than mecha.

Gears.

Chrome Gears for the Americans, because it turns out calling them a Metal Gear infringes copyright. Diesel Gears for the Brits, heavier and more armored. Iron Gears for the Russians, to match the curtain. All sorts of Gears! We've even simplified your Gears enough that you can make Brass Gears if you can scavenge the material to make one in your basement, and run it off of alcohol. Sure, it's nowhere near the potential of a normal Gear, but you can retrofit it with scrap armor and whatever man-portable weaponry you've got.

We've got mecha fighting the good fight, using little more than commonly available tech, and this is important. Because it turns out that Nazi Germany is notably more advanced than I remember them being in Wolfenstein, and Hitler's not the only one on his side with power armor. Turns out that they're not an uncommon sight... in addition to panzers with ridiculous armor and heavy weapons, saucer-shaped aircraft, and apparently an army of zombies. Yes, an actual army of zombies, which sees most of its use against the Soviets because a human army would have been frozen out by the winter (and kind of was).

So, the solution to the Nazis opening Pandora's box is to start getting involved and hitting key things - build Brass Gears, facilitate places to make them disappear fast when the Nazis freak out about fifteen-foot-tall walking tanks, and then start taking out targets. Critical bridges, infrastructure, even targeted assassinations when the opportunities presented themselves.

Curiously, however, at the start of 1942 the persecuted individuals in Nazi Germany that would have ended up in concentration camps ended up elsewhere. No starvations. No holocaust, or rather a greatly reduced one. Jews, Roma, anyone who had a flimsy excuse that would have been doomed... instead, all found themselves somewhere else entirely. The Germans still caused them to disappear, of that there was no question, but they found themselves on another world courtesy of a bit of fudging with the Kaleidoscope. Distant. Safe.

In the end, the thing that really changed things was a smaller Gear that was given to a soldier named Blazkowicz. Power armor only in the most technical terms, he got it in 1944 and cut a swath through Nazi Germany that culminated in his assassination of the Nazi high command and Hitler himself in a bunker in Berlin.

The remaining Nazi army took time to put down, even after the news of Germany being decapitated went out, though. Mere men happily surrender, after years of fighting what they knew to be a losing and insane battle. Zombie armies, though? Mad scientists with madmen happily following them? That takes a little more time, and the result was a highly disillusioned world. And considering everything that went on in Europe... Japan was much more willing to surrender in the Pacific theatre than they otherwise might have been. After all, they saw the results of having to call in an atomic strike on Berlin.

As the rubble was all being cleared through 1945 and 1946, it turned out that a zombie somehow got to Moscow and ate Stalin's face, so the Soviet union imploded after the war ended and split apart. Without Soviet support, the communists in China weren't able to get as strong a hold as they had, the end result being China split practically in half before the war flared up again in '52 - by '54 the Red Chinese government was in talks for a formal surrender.