Ouroboros
Overview
The Ouroboros army is a vast military force ruled by Grandmaster Meio and the mysterious Professor. Ouroboros rules the nation of China, and is primarily populated by Chinese and Russian soldiers. Their intention is nothing less than the domination of the world by whatever means are available to them.
The Ouroboros army is opposed to the agenda of the United Nations. They strike at targets worldwide to gain resources, spread terror, and weaken the abilities of their enemies to pursue them. They are considered at best a rogue state by the UN, with most people treating their operatives as terrorists. Most of the regular Ouroboros forces are fanatically devoted to Grandmaster Meio and the Professor, though neither of them is typically involved in the day-to-day operations of the organization.
Ouroboros is primarily a human force, though the Professor's sinister androids also have an important role in the operations of the army. They have no special antagonism toward robots, focused instead on subjugating all the people of the world. World domination is more important to Ouroboros than asserting the obvious racial supremacy of humans.
Characters
The Ouroboros army primarily consists of human soldiers recruited from China and Russia, though any human interested in assisting Grandmaster Meio dominate the world is welcome. Chinese people tend to be treated better than non-Chinese, as Meio's personal worldview sees China as the center of the new world. People of Anglo descent are particularly discriminated against within the organization, and need to work twice as hard to make comparable progress.
Ouroboros soldiers sign up willingly, and then are brainwashed through a rigorous training process into being absolutely loyal to Grandmaster Meio and the Professor. Their fanatical loyalty makes even ordinary human soldiers dangerous to Reploids, as they are willing to do almost anything in the name of achieving the organization's goals. Military-grade cybernetic enhancement and power armor technology is available to enterprising Ouroboros soldiers, putting them on par with the other great armies of the world.
Outside of the main army, Grandmaster Meio has a number of fronts that he uses to threaten the world from every corner. Meio's elite Striders act as his special forces, capable of executing the most dangerous infiltration and assassination missions anywhere in the world. The Crimson Serpent Triad has always been dominated by the Grandmaster, and is used as the umbrella organization for Meio's criminal activities. Slither Inc. is Meio's corporate face, allowing him access to legitimate business through a number of holding firms and industrial interests. Numerous pirates, including Captain Beard, work for Meio as a privateer force and navy.
The Professor sometimes creates units to assist Ouroboros, though focuses most of his effort on developing new inventions for the army to use. One of his greatest projects was developed with Meio's assistance; The Aesir, a group of four elite super-soldiers equipped with "Biometal" technology that enhances their natural skills to incredible heights.
Both OCs and FCs are open and encouraged. STRIDER OCs ARE NOT APPABLE. PLEASE DON'T ASK.
Goals
The goal of the Ouroboros organization is to conquer the world. In this new world, China would be put in the center of global affairs. Meio and his Striders would rule over the world as a new genetic aristocracy, reshaping humanity into their mad ideal. Those who had served Ouroboros during their rise to power would be rewarded with land, treasure and influence.
Philosophy
Ouroboros believes that human beings should control the Earth. Robots are of no concern to them, for good or ill; those robots that will not be reprogrammed to obey them will be destroyed eventually. Meio's objective is to alter humanity to create a natural ruling class of Striders like himself. Normal humans should naturally be subordinate to Striders, who are a higher order of human being. It is the natural order of things.
Technology is heavily integrated into Ouroboros. Humans are given access to military cybernetics and power armors to put them on par with robots. The e-humanization process is not used on Ouroboros soldiers, as the Grandmaster zealously protects the "Strider genes" from unworthy people. Meio's careful breeding programs and grueling training of new Striders is focused instead on creating a small number of truly superior humans rather than a large number of simply "improved" humans. If Meio cannot guide every aspect of a person's development from conception onward, he feels it is too much of a risk to give them genetically-based power. It is much easier to destroy a machine than it is to address a rogue e-human.
Androids are able to assist Ouroboros in its plans. The loyalty coding given to new Professor robots prevents them from being disloyal, and reinforces their overall place in the Ouroboros organization as ultimately subordinate to humans. While not overtly hostile to robots, the Grandmaster finds "constructs" to be distasteful. His new world will have very few of them.
History (Optional Reading for Applicants)
Grandmaster Meio was born centuries ago. Exact records of the circumstances of his birth have long since been lost, and the Grandmaster speaks rarely of his very early life. It is known that Meio was marked with the red eyes of those who are very strong in the Strider bloodline, and was raised as an early age to be an assassin. His career is believed to have formally started in the early 21st century.
Meio was said to have a spectacular career as a weapon of numerous shadow powers, taking whatever missions appeared to be the most lucrative no matter what the risk. His reputation for being able to accomplish apparently impossible objectives put him in the esteem of the world's most powerful people. He was believed to be the "Jade Man" of his era, an extraordinary Strider with genetic gifts most closely echoing the legendary founder of the Strider bloodline.
Meio somehow discovered a means to indefinitely sustain his life, though he appeared to be very old. His combat performance only seemed to improve with age, but he would take more and more time away from active work to study and meditate. He began to uncover and perfect ancient techniques that had thought to have been lost, enabling him to execute feats that marked him as far more than human. Meio became feared, and though many nations tried to destroy him, Meio appeared to be truly invincible. He built up an organization of loyal Striders around himself, soon becoming too valuable to destroy. This would be the undoing of his foes.
By means lost to history, Meio somehow gained a powerful artifact -- the Spear of Destiny, a weapon believed by the Christian religion to have supernatural powers. Whatever the truth of the Spear is, it somehow allowed Meio to develop progressively more incredible powers and rise to become the Secret Emperor of China. Through his proxies, Meio led the Chinese army to crush all the world's superpowers in a furious rampage of destruction in the 2060s, ending the war with the humiliating Treaty of Beijing. China reordered the world to its liking, and the Grandmaster found himself among the great masters of the world.
Meio started wars to amuse himself and to scatter the attention of his enemies. He engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union to press Europe, keeping the United Nations busy long enough to execute a brilliant campaign to bring Taiwan to heel. Rebellions occasionally rose against China, but Meio's military might and his Striders prevented anyone from being able to gain serious influence against him for decades. Only Japan, supported by the Americans, checked his ambitions across the Pacific; and Meio punished their continued interference by engineering the nuclear 'accident' that razed Tokyo.
Meio began the 22nd century by co-sponsoring the New Colossus of Rhodes alongside all of the other nuclear powers. In the tradition of said great powers, Meio made a show of participating in the universal nuclear weapons ban that prompted the construction of the Colossus -- that no one actually honored. It did make for a pleasant press event.
When Grandmaster Meio continued to live even some forty years after conquering China -- a feat done when to all appearances Meio was already an old man -- fear gradually spread through the halls of power around the world. Meio had already buried all of the people who had lived to see his rise, and appeared poise to watch their children go to their graves as well. If the Grandmaster was well and truly immortal, he would be able to arrange events to ultimately ensure his victory over the world. No one would live long enough to see the full sweep of his plans.
The allied powers began working to destroy Meio from within, more aggressively sponsoring sabotage against the Chinese empire. A twenty-five year long campaign of funding dissent and strife in the nation ultimately led to nothing when Meio revealed numerous spies in the organizations that had been created to work against him. A savage purge of the plants Meio knew about in his puppet governments followed, consolidating Meio's ironclad control over China -- but history calls this the beginning of China's fall.
It took ten years for another opportunity to arise, but this time the plans of other world powers succeeded. A terrorist group sponsored by a secret pact of Russian nations (themselves supported by Pakistan) stole several secret nuclear weapons from China and razed Papua New Guinea. This grotesque loss of control was sufficient to allow the United Nations to begin sending in 'peacekeeping' forces into China, a direct challenge to Meio's supremacy.
The United Nations was in China to help "restore order" by means of engaging in desperate conflict against the paramilitary forces that were the foundation of the actual power in China. Meio's Striders were only so numerous, forcing him to rely on conventional military tactics to fight the tide. However, Meio's lengthy military experience gave him an advantage over the green UN troops, his own men far more accustomed to combat than the foreign interlopers.
Thirty more years of guerilla warfare passed. Both sides developed veteran fighters. The ways of war were returning to the world's fighters. Meio saw the opportunity to continue his master plan to make stronger, superior Strider fighters and escalated the conflict, using nuclear weapons to prompt the UN into all-out war. If it was a war they wanted, Meio vowed, it would be war they would receive. Meio planned to destroy the UN once and for all and conquer all of Eurasia before the dawn of the 23rd century.
The ballistic missile shield developed by the Commonwealth nations with the help of the Americans served Meio's interests. His own scientists developed China's own defenses from such weaponry, forcing the battle to the ground where Meio was strongest. Meio kept his neighbors from being involved in the conflict, letting the bloody price of the war play out across the democracies he was fighting. Dictatorships have no fear of unfavorable press coverage, while his foes sweated and fretted. Meio was pleased.
The turning point of the conflict came when the United Nations sponsored what appeared to be a relatively ordinary special operations team, codenamed COMMANDO. Led by a full-conversion cyborg codenamed Captain Commando, the team consisted of Jin Saotome, the Karate Commando; Rod "Radd" Spencer, the Bionic Commando; and 'Super Joe', the Rocket Commando. The four men were set to the task of fighting Meio directly. Meio was initially unimpressed with them, but soon found himself fighting a desperate battle against their combined efforts.
An incredible campaign followed, with the Captain doing battle against Meio again and again. In the end, the Captain triumphed, defeating Grandmaster Meio and his final gambit to destroy the UN forces -- but apparently at the cost of his own life. The COMMANDO team was seemingly destroyed at the end of the battle, and Meio was made to cooperate with the United Nations. China was brought to heel, and the UN rose to prominence, promising to bring order and peace back to the world.
But Meio was not content. He was defeated but not destroyed, and worked within the new organization of Black SHIELD to regain his former power and prestige. Meio's plans once more began to churn, and slowly, carefully, he began to rebuild his former power...
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