MAJOR DEEJ UNIVERSE

Early Life Along the Rhine

In 1920, Olaf and Serena Rhines, a French-German farming couple living near the Rhine River in the Daxlanden region of Germany, discovered an infant girl abandoned along the riverbank in a crude bassinet of grass, mud, and branches. The baby was visibly unusual. Her ears were slightly pointed, her skin was unnaturally damp, and water seeped harmlessly from her pores when she was touched. After failing to locate her birth parents through church and police inquiries, the couple adopted the child and named her Rebekka Rhines.

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As she grew, Rebekka proved healthy, highly energetic, and naturally athletic, though she displayed unusual physiological traits from the beginning. She drank almost nothing but water, developed increasing control over the moisture permeating her body, and preferred rivers, fields, and open land to indoor study. Even so, she was educated at home and learned quickly. When her adoptive parents later had a natural son, Wilhelm, Rebekka formed a close bond with him. The two became deeply loyal siblings and remained emotionally inseparable through childhood.

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A Hidden Childhood

Rebekka’s abilities became increasingly apparent as she aged. By the age of ten, her swimming speed and endurance were already superhuman, and the Rhine became her refuge. She was more comfortable in water than on land and instinctively understood currents, flow, and aquatic behavior in ways that bordered on the preternatural. Her later mastery of hydrology and hydro-ecology would stem less from formal academics than from lifelong immersion, direct experience, mutant instinct, and magical attunement to water systems.

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Her adoptive parents recognized early that her unusual physiology and pointed ears would make her a target if exposed. As Germany grew more radicalized during the 1930s, Olaf and Serena increasingly kept Rebekka isolated from the community. Their fears proved justified. As Nazi ideology spread and repression intensified, the Rhines understood that if Rebekka were discovered, she would not merely be ostracized. She would be hunted.

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Discovery and the Fall of the Rhines Family

By 1935, the Rhines had decided to flee Germany and settle across the river in Munchausen, France. On the very day they prepared to leave, local Nazi enforcers arrived at their farm under the pretense of confirming political loyalty. During the encounter, a local party leader exposed Rebekka’s pointed ears by brushing her hair aside. Rebekka fled and hid in the Rhine, but the secret was out. The local leadership quickly escalated the matter, and armed Nazi personnel returned in force before the family could escape. Olaf, Serena, and Wilhelm were arrested while Rebekka remained hidden near the riverbank. Her father saw her and silently urged her to stay concealed. It was the last time she saw her adoptive parents alive.

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After days in hiding, Rebekka disguised herself and ventured into town, only to discover gravediggers burying Olaf and Serena in unmarked graves. Overcome with grief, she fled and nearly collided with the arriving car of Amell von Battenberg, then an SS officer. He noticed her ears immediately, ordered her seized, and after a struggle in which she incapacitated several soldiers, he shot her in the leg and had her transported to Bonn. There, she was delivered into the hands of Doctor Klaus von Steber, a scientist already conducting brutal wartime experimentation.

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Captivity Under Doctor Klaus von Steber

In Bonn, Rebekka’s life was shattered. Doctor Klaus von Steber subjected her to relentless experimentation, physical torture, and systematic conditioning. Through repeated testing he confirmed the scale of her water-manipulation abilities and began cataloguing her as some form of water-born magical anomaly. To break her resistance, he created specialized heat-based restraint devices, especially a thermal collar designed to exploit her extreme vulnerability to heat and dehydration. Under activation, the device could debilitate her in seconds.

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Over time, von Steber transformed her from prisoner into controlled weapon. Her powers were measured, stretched, weaponized, and redirected toward military utility. By the time Axis Force was being formalized under von Battenberg, Rebekka had been given the codename Wasser-Frau and conditioned for field service. She was never a true believer in Nazi ideology. She served under pain, coercion, and the constant threat of thermal punishment, functioning as a terrorized captive rather than a willing operative.

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Axis Force Service and Forced Atrocities

From the late 1930s into the early war years, Wasser-Frau was deployed as a living weapon by Baron Berlin and controlled through punishment, surveillance, and restraints. Though she resisted killing when she could, she was repeatedly forced into combat service. Her powers made her devastating in both open warfare and tactical engagements. This period left permanent moral and psychological scars. She became feared by enemies and allies alike, but internally remained trapped in a cycle of obedience, revulsion, and despair.

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Heinz Masslow and Her First True Break

In late 1941, while deployed in the Libyan desert against British forces, Rebekka collapsed from severe dehydration. A German field medic named Heinz Masslow carried her across miles of desert to safety and oversaw her recovery. Unlike those who had controlled her, Heinz showed compassion, patience, and genuine care. During her recovery, the two fell in love. For Rebekka, Heinz represented the first meaningful kindness she had experienced in years.

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Doctor Klaus von Steber eventually discovered the relationship and reacted with jealousy and fury. Heinz was arrested, subjected to a sham court proceeding, and executed by firing squad. Rebekka’s grief and rage broke through her conditioning. She destroyed much of von Steber’s lab, nearly drowned him, and escaped by reaching open water and vanishing downriver at extreme speed. Heinz’s death marked the beginning of her irreversible break from Axis Force. From that point forward, whatever remained of her coerced compliance was unstable and increasingly temporary.

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Wilhelm, Betrayal, and Further Loss

Months later, Rebekka was found again at the old Rhines farm. Axis personnel brought with them her adoptive brother, Wilhelm Rhines, now a Gestapo lieutenant. Rebekka had believed him dead. Their reunion briefly reopened the emotional world of their childhood before the truth emerged: Wilhelm had been told that his parents had betrayed him and had been raised under Nazi indoctrination after being separated from the family. When Rebekka told him what had really happened—the deaths of their parents, her imprisonment, her torture, and Heinz’s murder—Wilhelm’s conditioning cracked. He chose his sister over the regime and attempted to help her escape.

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Before he could act, Axis operative Heinkel gunned Wilhelm down. Rebekka was shot as well but managed to retaliate with her powers and flee into the river once more. Wilhelm’s death deepened her hatred of Axis Force and hardened her will to survive outside its control.

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Hiding Along the Rhine

From 1942 into 1944, Rebekka lived in hiding along the Rhine basin. During this time she refined her bodily water-displacement abilities until she could alter her size, posture, facial structure, and overall appearance with remarkable effectiveness. She survived as a fugitive, taking on shifting identities and slipping past civilians, soldiers, and even former Axis associates.

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During this hidden period, she observed local resistance activity and, at one point, witnessed Captain Invader coordinating with resistance members to protect civilians during a planned military action. His care in trying to shield townspeople and children from the coming battle shook her deeply. The propaganda she had lived under began to unravel. Her moral realignment, already underway after Heinz’s death, became much firmer by this period. She began to understand that the Allies were not the monsters she had been taught to fear and that she had spent years serving a truly monstrous system.

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Recapture by Major Drahtzieher

Her concealment ended when she accidentally crossed paths with Major Drahtzieher, a secretive Axis Force member with mind-control abilities. He quickly discerned her true identity and had her returned to Baron Berlin. Rebekka awoke fitted with a new suite of punitive restraint devices: a thermal collar, thermal wrist and leg bands, and an electrically punitive belt. Baron Berlin used these devices to force her back into service.

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By this phase of the war, Germany was failing, internal fractures were appearing, and even Baron Berlin was increasingly estranged from Hitler’s leadership. Rebekka, however, remained trapped inside the machine and was again forced into violent service, including operations on the Eastern Front. This period reaffirmed that she was not a willing loyalist, but a coerced operative repeatedly dragged back into atrocity through torture and technological control.

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Final Escape and Surrender

Rebekka eventually manipulated a rival scientist of Stuka’s by offering fragments of information about confidential research, including references to heavy water and other wartime projects. Hoping to steal advantage from Stuka, the scientist smuggled her away in transport. The plan failed when Heinkel uncovered the deception and attacked the vehicle, sending it crashing into a ravine. The scientist died. Rebekka survived, but badly wounded, and eventually found temporary refuge in a church near the front.

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There, she found herself lying beside another injured survivor: Captain Invader. The meeting could have turned deadly, but did not. Rather than a sharp exchange of quoted dialogue, the moment was defined by mutual recognition, exhaustion, and blunt sincerity. Rebekka made clear that she wished to surrender. Captain Invader, serious and unsparing, did not excuse her crimes, but neither did he deny the brutal circumstances that had shaped her wartime role. Allied intelligence had already assembled a partial dossier on Axis Force personnel, including intercepted reports concerning Wasser-Frau’s repeated escapes and disciplinary incidents. He knew enough of her story to recognize both the danger she posed and the suffering she had endured.

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The following morning, she was extracted and taken to London. There she provided intelligence to MI6 and American authorities concerning Baron Berlin’s internal power struggles, hidden caches of stolen treasure and resources, and the crimes and experimental practices of Doctor Klaus von Steber.

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Postwar Captivity, Release, and Redemption

For the remainder of the war and into late 1945, Rebekka was held in secure but humane captivity. Heating systems were built into her containment environment as a precaution, but she was no longer collared, chained, or treated as laboratory property. Though some personnel despised her for her Axis association, her official treatment was markedly more human than anything she had endured under Baron Berlin or Stuka.

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On 29 December 1945, Captain Invader—now Major Invader—secured authorization for her release. He returned her to the remnants of the Rhines farm and gave her money, identification papers, and one final directive: if she truly intended to make amends, then her life had to become one of service. He did not absolve her. He gave her a second chance and demanded that she earn it.

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Rebekka took that charge seriously. Under the new identity Raquel Nueva, she spent the difficult postwar years helping restore agricultural production, feeding struggling families, and aiding her local community. She eventually transferred the farm to the Wurst family but remained nearby in a small dwelling near the Rhine, where she could continue living close to the water that had defined her whole life. Her later exposure by West German intelligence would begin the next chapter of her story under the name Rhinemaiden (I).

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