MAJOR DEEJ UNIVERSE

In 1920, a young French-German couple, Olaf and Serena Rhines, who had a farm near what is now Daxlanden, Germany along the Rhine (Rhein in German) River, discovered an unusual wailing baby along the river's banks.  The baby girl wasn't more than a day old and was found in what looked like a bassinet of grass, mud and branches.  The couple noticed the baby's ears were pointed and that her skin was very damp and moist, such that when they picked the baby up, water oozed out of every pore of the baby, without harming or misshaping the baby. Concerned for its welfare, they took it back to their farm to care for it until they found out if someone had lost their baby.  After weeks of inquiries with the local police and church, no one came forward.  Rather than put the unusual child in an orphanage, they chose to adopt the abandoned child.

 

The child, now formally named Rebekka Rhines, was always a thirsty girl.  She didn't drink milk or tea or sweets...just water. Rebekka eventually gained control of her porously watery condition and stopped leaving 'puddles' everywhere she went.  She was a happy child and was very athletic and spry.  She grew her hair long to cover her pointed ears, preventing others from seeing how different she was.  She was home-schooled by her parents and although she wanted to be outdoors more than indoors, she learned at a typical if not accelerated pace compared to other school children her age as she was growing up. When Rebekka was about three years of age, her  adopted parents had their first natural born son named Wilhelm, Rebekka's new adopted brother.

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The older she grew, the better of a swimmer Rebekka became as well. By age 10, she was already outpacing Olympic level swimmers in timed runs clocked by Rebekka's father.  She loved swimming in the Rhine River such that she'd swim there twice a day, regardless of how cold or warm it was (as an added note, Rebekka enjoyed swimming naked; she hated to wear clothes while she swam, regardless of how cold it was or what her parents tried to educate her about modesty). As such, her parents kept her to themselves and as isolated from the community as possible, waylaying church and community gatherings to prevent any potential fears if Rebekka's uniqueness was discovered. Although Rebekka and her parents knew she could out-swim any of the Olympic athletes, they all knew that if she went to sign-up for the Olympics, she'd be labeled a freak and most likely dissected in a lab, thus, Rebekka's dream of standing on the medal platform could only be dreamed about vice experienced...even though she'd still pretend she was racing when she darted in and through the waters of the Rhine. Her brother, Wilhelm, in order to even try to keep up with Rebekka, had to learn to swim better than most boys his age, making Wilhelm exceptionally strong and fit in his youth. Both Wilhelm and Rebekka had a loving brother-sister relationship, helping each other out, sometimes lying for each other (so as not to get punished by their parents) and always telling each other their secrets. 

 

By age 12, Rebekka had already become a captivating and beautiful young girl. Her powerful green eyes alone were enough to melt the heart of any young man in those days.  During those1930s, even though young men eyed the beautiful women, they also had other interests on their mind - being a part of the rise of Germany's National Socialist (Nazi) Party.  As such, Rebekka's parents knew it was only a matter of time before others found out how different she was, and from the way the Nazi Party was treating the Jews, Rebekka would be treated far worse.

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In 1935, the Nazi Party was in full power and the Rhines knew they could stay in Germany no longer. Just as the Rhines were packing up their things unto a flat barge to take them across the river into France, where they intended to buy a small farm  a few miles down river in Munchhausen, France and live there. Sadly, that same day, a truckload of brownshirts decided to visit the Rhines farm to 'ensure their support for the Nazi Party'.

 

The Brownshirt leader, a mean, young local man that the Rhines knew to have a desire for Rebekka (but didn't know about her true heritage or of her pointy ears) swaggered down to where Rebekka was loading things on a cart. Deflecting the leader's pointed attention at her, flitting about to keep out of his space, the leader made a gesture to Rebekka and nicely pushed Rebekka's hair back from out of her face to get her attention only to unveil Rebekka's pointed ears. Rebekka slapped the leader's hand away and ran off to the river's edge, out of sight for any to see further. Out of their visual sight, she jumped into the Rhine River and stayed underwater for the duration of time.

 

The Brownshirt leader immediately demanded the Rhines answer for her obvious defect. They muttered to the Brownshirt leader that it was most likely a deformity at child birth from her actual parents which of whom were the ones that abandoned her. The Brownshirt leader, embarrassed for 'liking' a freak in front of his fellow Brownshirt men (all of whom where snickering and whispering about their leader), got red in the face and told the Rhines that they'll have to answer for covering up her being a freak.  The Brownshirt leader left in a huff.  The Rhines knew it; their time was borrowed from that moment on.

 

Once the simpering brownshirt leader told the local Nazi Party leader of Rebekka, the entire town's Nazi Party group and a few soldiers got into their cars and trucks and rapidly drove to the Rhines Farm.  They stopped the Rhines family before they could get out onto the flat barge with their last load of things. Rebekka, who'd gone off swimming to assuage her guilt at being caught, surfaced only to see her adopted parents and Wilhelm arrested.  Her father saw Rebekka out the corner of his eye and motioned her to hide and not give herself up. Her family was then hauled away in the long motorcade of Nazi vehicles, leaving Rebekka alone hiding along the river's edge.

 

For the next few days, Rebekka had no idea what to do. She ate what she could that was stowed on the barge, waiting and hoping her family would return. After two weeks of hiding in the river, Rebekka decided she needed to go find out what was going on. That night, using her adopted mother's large clothes, Rebekka, using her water powers, made herself larger and bloated, enabling her to fill out her adopted mother's clothes. Disguising herself with a scarf and hat, she hobbled down the road and into town to see what she could see.  Instead, she found gravediggers burying her parents in unmarked graves.  Rebekka was beside herself with fear and sadness.  Without knowing what happened to Wilhelm (guessing he'd been killed to), Rebekka ran out of town only to run in front of an SS commander's car that had been called to the town regarding Rebekka's freakish nature.  That SS officer was a man known as Major Amell VonBattenberg; a man who would later be called Baron Berlin. The SS officer, seeing the woman his car had nearly hit was sporting pointed ears immediately called his troops to grab her up and arrest her on the spot.  She fought hard and knocked out several of the troops, but not before VonBattenberg shot her in the leg, hobbling her from getting away. Rebekka was then caught, chained and taken to Bonn, Germany to a special scientific friend of VonBattenberg's; a cruel man known as Doctor Klaus Von Steber (AKA Stuka). As such, Rebekka's fate went from bad to worse.  

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Rebekka was taken to a secretive lab in Bonn where Doctor Von Steber had already been performing scientific experiments used in creating powerful and unique weapons for the military and his associates such as VonBattenburg.  Rebekka was probed, experimented on and abused in every way imaginable (and unimaginable) on a daily basis. As such, Von Steber discovered she has the power to control water. He forced her to perform dangerous feats, testing the upper limits of her powers, all the while using various torture methods and products to bend her will to his.  One such device was a remote controlled heat collar. If Rebekka was bad, he'd activate the collar, burning her neck and dehydrating her in mere seconds, leaving her weak and helpless, if not dying at times.  As such, Rebekka was forced to behave as a slave to VonSteber's every command and twisted desire.

 

With VonBattendburg's authorization, Von Steber started conditioning Rebekka for service in Vonbattenburg's soon-to-be formed elite supergroup called Axis Force . Giving Rebekka the codename "Wasster-Frau" (Water Woman), Von Steber continued conditioning her to perform no differently that a slave or a trained animal. Her blood and skin samples were reoutinely removed from her to 'catalog her kind', to which Von Steber simply identified her as some type of Water Nymph of ancient lore. Stuka attempted to get her pregnant (by him or other strong, young Aryan males) in expectation to birth a new race of aquatic super beings under the control of the Nazi regime, however, Rebekka never got pregnant, making Von Steber extremely angry (of course using the thermal collar on her beyond excessiveness).

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By 1939, Von Steber had 'conditioned' Rebekka to behave and follow orders.  A copy of the thermal collar's remote control was given to the Axis Force's new leader, SS Colonel VonBattenburg AKA Baron Berlin, to use with her when she was eventually assigned to the field with the Axis Force team.  Although "Wasser-Frau" fought against hurting anyone when she could, she was forced to use her powers against anyone Baron Berlin forced her to kill.  Depressed and suicidal, Rebekka had little interaction with others (mostly at the behest of Von Steber, now called by his codename Stuka) who was still pining over her). For the next few years of World War II, she was no better than a trained hound on a leash, allowed to use her water powers to defeat and kill whomever Baron Berlin ordered her to kill. In late 1941, however, Rebekka's fate took a unique turn, thanks to the Libyan desert and a competent German field medic.

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While in battle against a British tank regiment in Libya, Rebekka collapsed from dehydration during the battle. An enlisted German field medic, Heinz Masslow, came to Rebekka's aid.  He carried her across five miles of desert to a German camp where she was re-hydrated over the next three days.  During that time, Heinz and Rebekka fell in love.  He was a kind, caring soul who was not a compliant cog in the Nazi war machine.  When Rebekka was strong enough, Heinz recommended he take Rebekka back to Berlin for further observation.  Stuka agreed, but already the pangs of Stuka's jealousy began to show in his quipped candor and maliciousness to those around him.

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By January 1942, Stuka realized that Heinz and Rebekka were stalling in her 'delayed medical recovery'.  Angered by this, Stuka went back to Berlin to find out about Rebekka's and Heinz's affair. Stuka demanded the arrest of Heinz and once again began to torture Rebekka with a new even hotter thermal collar.  Days later, Heinz was tried in a "People's Court" (basically a Nazi kangaroo court) and sentenced to death by firing squad.  When Heinz was killed, Rebekka went mad.  She destroyed Stuka's lab and nearly drowned Stuka in the process.  She got away from two squads of SS soldiers by jumping into the river and hyper-swimming away.  They found her broken thermal collar along the shore a few miles downstream.

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Months later, she was found at the Rhines family farm, turned in by, once again, local Nazi Party townsfolk and neighbors.  There, she held off two squads of soldiers and a select group of Axis Force before the SS decided to bring her brother Wilhelm, now a Lieutenant in the Gestapo, to the farm.  There, Wilhelm met with Rebekka for the first time since they'd been separated. Rebekka, who'd thought Wilhelm had been dead all these years, was elated to see him.  They started to reminisce about their youth, but within minutes, he basically ordered her to turn herself over to the authorities and stop her foolishness.  Realizing Wilhelm was not acting like the brother she grew up with, tearfully told Wilhelm what she saw days after he'd been taken away; their parents dead and buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave. She told Wilhelm of all the torture and cruelty she had to endure and what they did to the only man she loved named Heinz.  Wilhelm, surprised to hear all of this, told Rebekka he was told his parents sold him out and as such was sent to an orphanage where he was trained and raised to be a Nazi officer the last few years. Together, they consoled each other and began to cry.

 

Wilhelm's Nazi conditioning then gave way to the love for his sister.

 

Wilhelm told Rebekka that he'd create a distraction long enough for her to jump into the river and get away from those surrounding the farm. He told her he'd meet up again with her at the 'farm we were supposed to move to (in Munchausen, France)'. With that, Wilhelm made a fateful career decision that day-and a fatal one.

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That's when the Axis Force member known as Heinkel unleashed a lethal hail of bullets upon Wilhelm before he could turn around. Wilhelm was instantly killed; Rebekka was shot in three places, but was able to use her powers and skills to douse the troops and leap into the river, making a narrow escape amidst a hail of gunfire, weapons and super powers actions.  Luckily, for Rebekka, she was able to get away once more...but again, only for awhile.

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From that time in 1942 to March of 1944, Rebekka hid. She learned to use her water powers to change her facial and body features VERY well, one day looking like an old grandmother to another day like hunched over man, fooling everyone around her including her ex-teammates, Axis Force who actually had troops actively searching up and down the Rhine River for her all the time. She would have stayed hidden from them except for one person - Captain Invader; the leader of the Allied supergroup of heroes.  One night she saw a disguised man talking with a band of those she knew to be part of the local resistance.  Using her powers, she was able to listen in on the conversation and learn about a plan the Allied Fighters were working with the local resistance to take down the town's Nazi troops and keep the bridge over the Rhine River open. Unwilling to volunteer nor get involved, she instead denoted the Captain's consistent effort to ensure the locals didn't get hurt in the battle or get caught in the line of fire, going so far as to helping plan where the children should best hide so as to be ushered out of the town it their safety was an issue. Rebekka was surprised to hear these propagandized 'verdamnt Amerikaners' being so considerate and kind. She quickly realized that the Allies were indeed the 'better' people in this war.

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Knowing she couldn't be found anywhere in this skirmish, Rebekka immediately set out back to her small underwater cave she'd been hiding in most of the time. Sadly, when she came around the corner, she bumped into a man who seemed to be lurking on the corner of the building. She fell backwards and onto the ground, unceremoniously, losing control of the water in her body she was using to make herself look bigger. As such, she made a bit of a splash when she fell, to which the man she'd bumped into noted.  The man's eyes glowed a bright red...and for the next week's time, Rebekka remembered nothing until she awoke in a prison cell.  The man she ran into was a secretive member of Axis Force known as Major Drahtzieher. Using his mind control powers, he took control of Rebekka's mind quickly confirming she was their old teammate, Wasser-Frau.  With that, Wasser-Frau was promptly returned to Baron Berlin.

 

When Rebekka awoke, she was now wearing a new Axis Force costume along with a thermal collar, two wrist thermal bands, two leg thermal bands and a belt that was designed for electrocution. Baron Berlin then reintroduced himself to her, tortured her for the next two days with the thermal bands and belt of pain, forcing her back into service with Axis Force.  Try as she could, she was unable to break free of her new restraints. What she did know was that the Nazis were starting to lose the war, and Baron Berlin blamed Hitler for it.  Regardless, Rebekka was once again forced to use her powers as Wasser-Frau to kill hundreds of Allied soldiers, predominantly Russian ones at the Russian frontlines. She and a small handful of Axis Force members, one of them being Heinkel, the man who killed her lover, were all that was left by the end of 1944. At one point, Rebekka tried her best to seduce Heinkel so as to get close enough to him to kill him, but as luck would have it, she found a rival scientist of Stuka's that hated Stuka more than she did. That led to her next attempt at freedom.

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Mentioning to the rival scientist that she knew all of Stuka's secrets he'd been working on and that she'd tell him everything if he took her back to his labs and away from the warfare.  Using all of his meager influence, the rival scientist tried his best to officially get her back to his labs, but failed. Using her last bit of influence on him, she mentioned about 'heavy water' experiments (nuclear weaponry) (which Stuka had mentioned in passing in his labs once in front of her, but contemptuously stated he didn't have time to 'focus' on that one project when there were dozens of new sciences to discover instead), and that was all the rival scientist needed to break the rules.

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The rival scientist stuffed Rebekka in a lab box and had troopers 'load it up on his truck' to go to his labs.  The whole thing would have worked had Heinkel not figured the scientist out (a tad bit late, but still figured it out), chasing the scientist's truck down and opening fire on it causing the scientist's vehicle to crash down into a ravine several hundred feet below.  Heinkel formed a search party to look for them only to find the dead rival scientist and the box with no Wasser-Frau inside it.

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Rebekka escaped but was severely wounded. She made it to a small German town miles further along the basin close to the combat line. There, a priest took her in to the church and cared for her wounds. There in the church, she was placed on a stretcher and taken to rest next to another wounded person on a stretcher.

 

The person next to her...she'd seen before.

 

That person was Captain Invader.

 

Both looked at each other for a split second.

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Captain Invader pulled out his gun; Rebekka formed water daggers from water taken off the ground.

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Both eyed each other, but didn't attack.

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Rebekka then asked, 'Can I surrender to you?' to which the Captain asked, 'Did you allow innocent men, women and children your murdered in cold blood to surrender to you first?'

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Rebekka looked down at the floor, dropped the water daggers into puddles and meekly said "Nein (No)".

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The Captain kept his guns on her a few more seconds and then said to Rebekka, "Yeah, well you're lucky I know who you are and what you've been going through. I'm...ah...sorry about your brother. Wilhelm. I lost a brother too. Oh, and your boyfriend, Hienz too. Neither deserved to die that way."

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Completely awestruck that Captain Invader know anything about her, Rebekka looked at him with curious eyes, attempting to solve the riddle of who this man really was.

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The Captain holstered his gun, relaxed back into the stretcher, looking back up at the ceiling, and said, "Yea. I've read your file. You've been screwed over more than a stock holder on Black Friday. If you really want to surrender to me, let me catch 20 winks and we'll get you outta here in the morning to somewhere safe. Somewhere you'll never be forced to hurt anyone ever again. Sound fair, goldilocks?"

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Amazed at the entire conversation Rebekka had no other response than "Jawol, Capitaine". Both sunk down into their stretchers and slept. Neither slept long, but for the first time in quite awhile, they both slept deep.

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The next morning, Rebekka was secreted away from the church and taken to London, England. There, she was more than happy to tell MI6 and the CIA all they wanted to know...so long as Captain Invader was there during the interrogations and debriefings.  During her mass information dump, she'd told them about Baron Berlin's rift with Adolph Hitler and that the Baron had been taking dozens of treasure troves of gold, art and rare metals and moving them to secretive sites that not even some of his own teammates in Axis Force knew of. She also told them all about Stuka and his science experiments and the tortures he'd done on living beings, including all he'd done to her.

 

For the rest of the war (actually until December 1945),  Rebekka was kept in captivity in a cell that had rapid-heating units in the walls that could be engaged should she get out of control...but no collars or pain devices; not even chains.  She was treated humanely even though the soldiers guarding her spat and cursed at her for being a 'Nazi freak'.

 

On 29 December 1945, Captain Invader (now promoted to Major) gained authorization to release Rebekka.  Giving her new identity papers, Major Invader flew Rebekka back to Germany to her family's Rhine Farm, which had been practically destroyed during the war. There, she found a few photos and family items that remained. The Major gave her both American and military script money for her to use to start anew (several thousand dollars worth) and gave her a file that had information about her brother Wilhelm and her lover Heinz, including pictures of both of them. The Major gave her a short speech about 'staying low' and that she now had a chance to 'start a new life' and not let it go to waste, respecting all those that died before her.  She cried and thanked the Major who instead held her at arms length and simply stated, "I can't be your crying post, missy. You killed too many good people for me to accept your tears. You want to made amends? You want to do something to maybe start making amends? Start by helping others. Start by being a good person. Volunteer. Help save lives with your water powers. Water crops in the fields with your powers for all I care, but DO SOMETHING GOOD...and don't stop. You have a LOT to do to make up for what you did and even then, it won't be enough, girly. You just got a second chance. Do. Something. Right. With. It."....and walked away.

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For the next few years, Rebekka, now using the newly given name of Raquel Nueva, did just what Major Invader told her she should do. She took in several down-and-out German families and together, they tilled, planted and farmed the old Rhines Farm lands, using their freshly grown food to help feed not only themselves, but more than half of the their starving community. In time, Rebekka gave the farm to a kind family (and their very handsome son, Stephan), the Wurst family. Rebekka/Raquel stayed on and moved into a small, on-property shack on the edge of the Rhine River and the farm, allowing for her easily (and less visually seen) access to swim in the river. 

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Eventually, Raquel Nueva was discovered to have once been Rebekka Rhines/Wasser-Frau by a certain West German intelligence agent...but that's a story for her as Rhinemaiden I.

 

The 2nd part of this character's story continues in Rhidemaiden I's story.

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