Fenris

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Background

Powers and Abilities

The Strucker twins are reasonably competent terrorist leaders, in good physical condition and with some training.

When in physical contact, they can emit powerful energy beams from their hands. Andreas’s discharges are chiefly concussive energy, whereas Andrea’s power has chiefly disintegrative effects. They both boil down to Energy Blast in DC Heroes RPG terms, though.

They cannot blast if separated, but the secondary sources  statements that they cannot discharge energy simultaneously are invalidated by primary sources . Their abilities were once stated to be bio-electric, which sounds mistaken. Lastly, accounts that they must effect skin-to-skin contact are also erroneous, since they routinely wear full gloves whilst blasting.

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Their energy beams are well able to smash thick ferroconcrete walls and harm superhumans. Furthermore, they have enough range to shoot down low-flying aircrafts. They can be swept across a target, for instance to raze a hangar or other light building. A single hit can be powerful enough to down an helicopter gunship.

Fenris usually starts encounters at a range, often with surprise on their side. In DC Heroes RPG terms; they also have a surprisingly robust Initiative. This normally allows them to keep opponents on the defensive and at a range, since most will have to be extra-careful to avoid their powerful, accurate blasts.

The twins are in good shape and have athletic skills, but do not appear to have special hand-to-hand combat training or experience. Their German is rusty, as they have not really spoken the language since their childhood.

History

Andrea and Andreas are the children of the dreaded Baron Wolfgang von Strucker. This is the famous Nazi war criminal who escaped the Allies to become the leader of the most powerful criminal organisation in the world, Hydra.

Wolfgang apparently never really cared for his children. But it would seem that he gave them considerable financial support so they would built another terror organisation furthering the general goals of Hydra. While it is possible that the twins developed their wealth independently, this is not the most likely explanation.

Hail Hydra !

The Fenris organisation suddenly became more powerful during the years where Strucker was believed dead on Hydra Island. It basically disappeared after Strucker resurfaced. Thus, it is likely that Fenris was the product of a contingency plan to keep Strucker’s opponents busy as he reconstructed Hydra.

From a later bit of dialogue, it would seem that the Fenris organisation was planned by the Baron to operate under the name Hydra. But his children disobeyed and came up with the Fenris brand.

The Strucker children received artificially-created mutant powers of energy emission, presumably during their youth, from an unknown source. Perhaps Baron Strucker contracted Arnim Zola for this.

Thanks to their Hydra backing, running a terrorist organisation never seems to have been a full-time occupation for the Strucker twins. They spent most of their time as idle, decadent rich tourists indulging in a enormous number of lavish parties, safaris, power-brokering, cruises, sexual entertainment, drugs, etc.. They also developed a well-earned reputation for lechery and being sexually jaded.

Once, during a safari in Kenya, they characteristically started abusing the locals but they and their hired help were soundly thrashed by Ororo Munroe, then on a solo homecoming trip. The Struckers soon avenged themselves by sniping Munroe out in the veldt, though the X-Man survived the wound without them realising it.

The trial of Magneto

Fenris was at the height of its power in the mid-1980s, at about the same time as the incident with Munroe happened. When Magneto was arrested and a special international tribunal was assembled in Paris to judge him, the Strucker children saw a golden opportunity to avenge a past incident.

In the early 1960s, Magneto, Professor Xavier and a local girl named Gabrielle Haller had foiled Strucker’s plan to appropriate an enormous stockpile of gold, which Magneto ended up appropriating. Haller and Xavier being both present at the trial, the Strucker twins decided to kill all three opponents of their father.

To do so, they likely expanded the size of their organisation with extra gear and mercenaries.

During the weeks before the trial, the Fenris organisation struck throughout Europe. They targeted hospitals, NATO bases, etc. and claiming to be the X-Men fighting to free Magneto. These actions did terrible damage to the image of mutants worldwide. They also kept the X-Men occupied so that they would be unable to protect Xavier at the Palais de Justice .

As Fenris, the twins burst through a wall and assaulted Magneto and Xavier. But several X-Men realised what was going on and intervened despite the Fenris troops’s efforts, foiling the multiple murder attempt. Defeated, the Strucker twins blasted their way free and were washed away by the Seine.

With most of its operatives and heavy gear stopped by the X-Men, the Fenris organisation apparently never recovered from this defeat. It seems, in fact, that it entirely ceased to exist, except for occasional hirelings the twins later recruited for specific purposes. Most likely, the Baron reclaimed whatever was left and integrated those resources into his reconstruction of Hydra.

Acts of vengeance

Thus, they seemingly renounced being the leaders of a high-profile terrorist organisation – which they most likely couldn’t run on their own, anyway. But the Strucker twins continued to be occasionally active as the super-villains Fenris.

During the Acts of Vengeance  conspiracy, one of the head conspirators, Doctor Doom, retained the new Jester to assemble an unlikely team of villains to attack the Avengers.

One goal of the Acts of Vengeance was to attack heroes with completely unexpected villains. The Jester thus hired Hydro-Man and Fenris, convinced the Leader to send in his henchman Rock, and added a tricked-out Hulk robot of his own design.

Led by Fenris, this heteroclite team sprung its attack whilst the Avengers were giving a press conference against the latest governmental effort toward superhuman registration. They actually performed quite well, but the intervention of Cloak and Dagger helped turn the tide against them. The Strucker twins were defeated and arrested, possibly for the first time.

Just the two of us

The Strucker twins were soon free, and resumed their lavish lifestyle. At one point they were given a tip about the activities of Forge and Banshee, two former X-Men who were investigating the rest of the team, which had seemingly been killed in Dallas. As they were investigating in the Cyclades, the two men suddenly changed their plans upon learning of Dazzler’s reappearance.

Thus, when the Struckers shot down their small plane, the two mutants were not aboard. The only casualty was Cylla, a local pilot (who narrowly survived and was later forced to join the Reavers).

Shortly after that episode, the Strucker twins learned that Mesmero had managed to become a therapist for the rich and powerful. His clientele included several heads of state such as Margaret Thatcher .

Mesmero’s deal was straight. He was using his hypnotic powers to provide deep, highly refreshing relaxation to erase stress and fatigue. The Struckers sent in combat droids to force Mesmero to become their lackey and turn his power over his clientele to much more nefarious purposes.

The wily Mesmero sought protection in hypnotising British super-team Excalibur into becoming his servants. Thus, when Fenris attempted to force his hand, they were confronted by powerful lackeys.

Kitty Pryde, then separated from the team, intervened and Excalibur recovered their free will. Her pet dragon Lockheed forced Mesmero to run. Her schoolmates at the St. Searle School for Girls mobbed and clobbered the Strucker twins as soon as Nightcrawler separated Andrea and Andreas to neutralise their power. Scotland Yard had the two Neo-Nazis arrested.

Apparently, the British police lacked the proof to hold them. The Strucker twins went free almost immediately. Seemingly resuming prior efforts, they concluded in Madripoor an alliance with Matsuo Tsurayaba, the man heading one of the spin-off cults of the Hand. The Black Widow and several X-Men tried to stop this, but only succeeded in apprehending some random hirelings and a trio of ringers.

Upstarts

The Strucker twins needed Hand manpower as they took part in the so-called Upstarts competition (another hint that the Fenris organisation was gone). This competitive event pitted a number of rich and influential villains against each other, and the winner was promised immortality.

The points in this competition were earned by defeating and capturing mutant heroes. To do that the Struckers wanted to hire the services of the recently resurrected, exceedingly deadly agent of Tsurayaba – Omega Red.

Though Tsurayaba’s agents failed to capture the X-Men even with Omega Red’s backing, they managed to get their prize target. That was Wolverine, who was presumably worth a lot of points. The rescue effort from the X-Men started off well, but they were then defeated and the whole rescue team was captured.

The intervention of German super-agent Maverick turned the tables, but though the X-Men won they weren’t able to capture Fenris.

After this failure the Strucker siblings apparently lost the support of Tsurayaba, who had barely escaped with his life. They remained active in the Upstarts competition, but no other attempt at ’procuring‘ a mutant was documented for months.

Life of crime

However, the Strucker twins still had significant (though largely undocumented) criminals interests and connections. Thus, they were present in 1992 to a major underworld meeting in Vegas where disparate parties negotiated. These ranged as wide as the Hand, the Hammerhead family, the Slug, Justin Hammer, the Red Skull, the then-current Secret Empire, etc..

The Kingpin had recently fallen, and these various parties were attempting to divide up his enormous underworld empire with a minimum of chaos.

During this conference, they clashed against their lesser-known brother Werner. This was part of a feud as to whom was the worthy heir of their supposedly deceased father and should lead the rebuilding of Hydra. But with the Fenris organisation gone, Werner was the more credible Strucker, in particular thanks to his work with the Gnobian extra-terrestrials linked to his father’s past.

This gave him some weight in claiming part of the old Kingpin holdings. However Andrea and Andreas violently refused any accord that would legitimise Werner, making them one of the main obstacles for the negotiation to move forward. At one point they nearly killed Hammerhead in a fit of pique before storming out of the room.

Werner was gaining the upper hand, and Andrea and Andreas had damaged their credibility through their outbursts and obvious sibling rivalry toward Werner.

The conference predictably collapsed under the weight of the rivalries and hatred of the participants… and the intervention of a number of vigilantes. Fenris was nearly taken out by Nomad, but escaped thanks to the coincidental intervention of Maggia enforcers.

Unbeknownst to them, several of the difficulties encountered by the conference were orchestrated by their own father, secretly alive and allied with Werner. Baron Wolfgang von Strucker ended up killing Werner before his son could become a rival, but continued his efforts to divide so Hydra could conquer.

Mutant misadventures

By the mid-90s, the Struckers had reconstituted the seed for a new version of the Fenris organisation. However, those men and the gear the Struckers equipped them with were clearly not as good as the Fenris terrorists of ten years prior.

Along with a Fenris squad, the twins entered a new round of Upstarts competition. It was a themed event called the Younghunt, where competitors earned points by kidnapping current or former members of the New Mutants or the Hellions. Trying to kill two birds with one stone, they went to Brazil’s Nova Roma to assault Magma and Empath.

They nearly succeeded, killing or badly wounding several Nova Roma refugees. They then succeeded in taking down most of their own men, after Empath turned those mercenaries against their employers. But S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Danielle Moonstar stopped them.

Talkin’ ’bout my generation

Some months later, in New York City, Fenris and a Fenris squad attempted to hijack a working medical prototype which emitted a field playing havoc with natural mutations. Though the research program had been shelved for political reasons, Andreas wanted to study it and use it as an anti-mutants weapon.

However, the students of Generation X stumbled upon Fenris’s attack on the courier. After considerable damage was inflicted upon their surroundings (largely because of the prototype spurring nearby mutant powers out of control), the young mutants stopped them. Andrea and Andreas managed to flee in the chaos and fires, though their men deserted them.

The twins were next seen among the somewhat random band of mutants who allied with Exodus and the Acolytes. The goal was to capture secrets of the High Evolutionary, and use them to beat the deadly Legacy Virus.

The twins may have joined out of a sense a self-preservation, as it then looked like the virus might be able to reap much of the world’s mutant population. But Andrea and Andreas soon came to plot to abscond with the prize — Isotope E — and make a fortune selling it to parties interested in developing a cure for the virus.

However, Exodus and his troops never managed to get the Isotope, due to the stiff opposition of the Knights of Wundagore and Quicksilver.

The Strucker twins later attempted to procure the Momentary Princess. This was a jewel endowed with mystical powers which both their father and Remy Lebeau’s father had been trying to get for decades. They were easily defeated by Gambit and his ally Sekhmet Conoway.

V for Victory, part 1

The Strucker siblings next worked for their father – the first such documented case, though there apparently were prior examples of this. Strucker was angling for world domination via mind-controling nano-probes, and several branches of that plan had already led to clashes with super-heroes such as the Thunderbolts and the Avengers.

Strucker’s children were charged with reclaiming a specific strain of nanites that the V-Battalion had intercepted. They would then use that strain to take control of Atlantis in the name of Hydra (or Fenris, as they insisted).

Given the technical difficulties involved, the twins first hired Diamondback to conduct the theft, then placed her under nanite control to ensure her reliability. Diamondback fulfilled her contract, though she was severely wounded by the Battalion’s Citizen V.

The twins rushed to meet with another ally, MODOK. His AIM technicians diffused the nanites over Atlantis before the V-Battalion could intervene. This led to a war between Atlantis and the V-Battalion.

V for Victory, part 2

Meanwhile, Citizen V went to Paris to intercept the Strucker twins at a Seurat  expo. As John Watkins III he had been one of the sexual conquests of Andrea Strucker, and knew she still considered him one her favourite boy toys. Though Andreas was annoyed to see Watkins (likely because he commanded so much of his sister’s attention), Andrea was delighted.

Watkins came to realise that the female Strucker was not really committed to her father’s plan. She in fact considered it with some horror, and likely could be persuaded to oppose it. Strucker, on her end, was intrigued to see how Watkins, about whom she had intimate knowledge, seemed to be a changed man.

Watkins convinced Andrea to help. She knocked out and tied up her own brother as she went back to her father, letting Citizen V aboard the Hydra base. Her treachery was discovered and Baron Strucker engaged Citizen V in personal combat. During the fight, Andrea and eventually Wolfgang realised that Citizen V was not Watkins.

Andrea correctly guessed that the man was actually Helmut Zemo. She confronted “Citizen V” with this knowledge, proud of her deduction. But Zemo murdered her to protect his ruse. In the end, the sacrifice of V-Battalion member Iron Cross foiled both Strucker and Zemo’s plans. Still, Zemo managed to continue passing himself for Watkins III for a while.

(Andrea would eventually become the new Swordsman under complicated circumstances – see his entry. As to Andreas, she was later briefly clonally resurrected by Arnim Zola thanks to her brother’s efforts – see the Swordsman (Strucker) and Arnim Zola entries for more about this.)

Description

Andrea is rail-thin, perhaps to an unhealthy degree. In the 1990s Andreas was, of course, wearing a ponytail.

Personality

The Strucker twins are toxically co-dependant, with Andrea being obviously the dominant one and treating Andreas like a kid brother. They are arrogant, decadent, cruel aristocrats for whom the world is but a playground filled inconsequential extras. They consider their co-dependency to be a form of love too pure and too strong for the rabble to understand.

Though they do not seem to have particular contacts with their father (or perhaps because of it), the Fenris twins consider themselves to be inheritors of and defenders of the Nazi cause. They sport all the usual Nazi beliefs.

They also know the history of Strucker during the war. Thus, they are always interested in occasions to avenge defeats from that era, for instance by confronting famous anti-Nazi operatives such as Captain America. They also have a particular beef with the X-Men.

The Strucker twins tend to be haughty and overconfident, and consider that bad things only happen to lowlier people. This means they’re not very good at assessing risks — yet they are surprisingly successful given their limitations and the one-trick-pony aspect of their power. Money and contacts help a lot with this, of course, and their high Initiatives are a definite asset.

One of the most notable traits of the twins is their utter and vocal contempt for anybody of lower status than they are. Which, as far as they are concerned, is basically everybody. They consider peóns to be utterly expendable and inconsequential, and of very limited intelligence and taste. Basically, they openly treat everybody but senior nobility as subhumans.

The twins do not deal well with frustration at all, either. Their reaction is likely to involve powerful, destructive energy beams.

Quotes

Andrea: “We are – FENRIS !”
Andreas: “The great wolf – before whose dread power, the entire world will bow ! We have come, Magneto…”
Andrea: “…to deliver the fate you so richly deserve.”

Andrea: “You worry needlessly, Kramer. The bribes we paid will more than guarantee our safety. As far as the authorities are concerned, we were never here, and this incident never happened. Unless, of course, a foolish guide [such as yourself] takes it into his head to say something he shouldn’t. That would be most… regrettable.”

Andreas: “Splendid shooting, Andrea.”
Andrea: “We are Struckers, Andreas. We do not miss.”

Andreas: “We seek a prize greater than you would guess, Herr Doktor. Immortality for ourselves – and a new Reich.”

Andreas, oggling Magma: “That’s the girl. Simply adorable. A little lava would do to warm my toes under the blankets any day, eh, sister ?”
Andrea: “For once, Andreas, consider the priority of our mission over the dictates of your hormones.”

Andreas: “I recognise the costume, sister. She is Meggan, of Excalibur.”
Andrea: “A trap, then. How delightful.”

By Sébastien Andrivet.

Source of Character: Marvel Universe (chiefly X-Men books).

Helper(s): Cassius335, Darci, Gareth Lewis, Capita_Senyera.