Hans Schulz

**Dr. Hans Schulz** (known formally as Herr Colonel Doktor Schulz and more commonly as "That German Bastard") was an arms dealer, mad scientist, known war criminal, and co-founder of Schulz, Hopkins & Co., Schulz Arms Corporation, and Schulz Omniemporium. As a senior officer (Colonel) in the notorious Black Cell Labs during The Great German War, Dr. Schulz was a pioneer in electric and gas based weaponry.

## History

### The Great German War

*Main article: The Great German War*
His crowning achievement during The Great German War was the deployment of his skin-melting gas in The Battle for the Brandenburg Gate, which the Prussians retook at great cost to civilian life and environmental desolation.

After witnessing Schulz carefully observing the aftermath of The Battle for the Brandenburg Gate, grinning manically and effusively describing the results, his wife, Mari Ulrich, finally realized that in the calculus of Dr. Schulz, she meant little more than the number of corpses he counted on the ground, and left him soon after.

When the war ended poorly for Prussia, the triumphant Bavarian Confederacy vigorously pursued officers of the Black Cell Lab for war crimes. Schulz escaped offworld, however, and sought refuge with the Knights Mercantile, who happily overlooked his horrendous past in return for his technical expertise.

### Knights Mercantile

Schulz's first official role in the Knights Mercantile was to field-test his gas and electric weaponry as part of a second expedition to the Taino Basin on Sierna. Though the expedition ended in death, madness and very poor financial returns, Schulz survived, albeit with the loss of his soul to the Dark God Aztlan.

Schulz went on to lead a KM operation in Russia, alongside Mickey Finnegan. He was instrumental to the Russian victory against the Aeldrum Trade Company at the Second Battle of Dalcia and to the successful establishment of the Knights Mercantile chapter in Russia. His Schulz Rifle, Schulz Pistol, and automatic weapon designs, incubated in Russia, popularized the bolt action firearm across the cosmos and became a byword for reliable, high-powered weaponry.

### Death

Schulz himself became a figure of great influence within the Knights Mercantile, using his clout to advance his personal campaign to defeat the dark god Aztlan and organize a third expedition to Taino Basin. Though Schulz, physically feeble throughout much of his life, succumbed to age before Aztlan could be defeated, his torment in death was comparatively brief thanks to the efforts of Kelly MacNial, Al the Dwarf, Mimir, J. Paul Getty, and Coyote, who ultimately undid Aztlan's power.

### Aftermath

The cost of Schulz's war against Aztlan was astronomical, running into the millions of Crecibles spent on hundreds of mercenaries, two airships (both destroyed), dozens of occultists and scholars, and a slew of special operations to track down and retrieve The Codex Exilium and other resoures with which to combat Aztlan. Schulz was careful to shield his flagship companies from his creditors, however, heavily leveraging the Second Taino Expedition and building a network of shell firms to attract greedy KM figures interested in controlling the famed Schulz Arms Company.

After his death, many of Schulz's assets vanished, seemingly without a trace. Some were seized by creditors and rivals, others by local managers, but most ended in the hands of Dr. Ingrid Gewerschmidt, Dr. Schulz's friend and business partner. Gewerschmidt would use these resources to rebuild the Black Cell Lab as a Zulkirite death cult within the Knights Mercantile. This organization was the springboard for her long shadow war against Mimir and the Aeldrum Trade Company, culminating in the events of The Black Pyramid Campaign.

## Personality

Schulz was the quintessential manipulative bastard. With only a few exceptions, he did not feel enough empathy with other sentient beings to see them as anything more than game pieces on a grand board. His one and only goal was the advancement of his personal projects; all other activities existed only to keep himself in a position where he could continue to work on the subjects that fascinated him - which happened mostly to be weapons of increasingly disturbing deadliness.

Despite this, he had a handful of soft spots. Schulz had a great fondness for young people placed under his care - he doted on Billy the Urchin and supported the freedom and growth of Nat, whom many believe to be Schulz's bastard child. He later tried to replicate the experience by adopting Kelly McNiall and raising him to be a KM agent, although as Kelly grew older and Schulz grew increasingly manic, their relationship deteriorated. He also felt a curious kinship with the single-minded yeti Barnaby and would make sure that he was always stocked with the finest literature for Barnaby to consume.

## Rumors

It is rumored that Schulz's alleged bastard son Nat was in fact the result of a tryst while at the Black Cell Lab with his coworker Dr. Ingrid Gewerschmidt and that the latter had, during the KM Operation in Dalcia, murdered her original ward and replaced him with Nat. Many consider this to be a far-fetched idea, although the speed and completeness with which Ingrid took over his assets suggests that Schulz may have allowed or actively encouraged her to do so, indicating that the two were close. Why then he did not accept Ingrid's body-preserving shambler serum is a curious question - it is likely that his increasingly weak body would not be able to stand the treatment.