Blackjacket

**Key Features** | »MP18 SMG»Black Smoke Grenades»Black Flak Jacket»Black smoke filtering goggles»Eurasian styled Uniform (with pointy mongol helmet)

## Tactical Analysis

* **It's the current gear**: No proper Guard force could do without Blackjackets. Dispensers of the Guard's black smoke (which is partially responsible for the term), the Machine Pistol equipped Blackjacket is effective against infantry and moves very swiftly thanks to his or her cavorite belt, though they are both quite fragile and short ranged, in addition to lacking in penetrating power with their weapons. They are on the other hand, cheap and quick to build and have a dash of derring-do to close in the face of suppression.

* **Gas and laughs**: The Blackjacket is most valuable because of their ability to cheaply plaster a battlefield with Black Smoke, a relatively innocuous chemical that while causing some minor nuisances to the health department, is capable of absorbing nearly all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, making it nearly impossible to see through while the Guard's own forces have a special lens that allows sight through the stuff.

* **Graves are the keystone of the reaction**: Being relatively fragile and short-ranged with lackluster armor piercing abilities means that Blackjackets are not well suited for direct frontal assaults on frontal positions or for handling vehicles, especially vehicles with anti-infantry capabilities. In addition, man for man the Blackjacket suffers against most of his or her competition.

* **Praise the Lord, pass the ammunition**: The most skilled and long-lived of Blackjackets get an upgrade, being handed gas masks to protect against dastardly chemical weapons (such as their own black smoke blowing the wrong way) in addition to getting their hands on Federov Avtomat mark 10 assault rifles that offer greater range and armor piercing abilities, giving them more punch against heavier infantry.

## Background

*Rally to the King, rally to the Emperor!*

-Motto of Blackjackets.
By its very nature, the Reactionary Guard is not a very socially mobile society. The Guard's ideology and ''raison d'être'' themselves get in the way of such a thing. For all the glamour of nobles floating around in fanciful airships and flying cities, someone's got to scrub the toilets and tend to jobs associated with serfs. If there are nobles, there should also be commoners.

Most of the Blackjackets are born in tubes designed by the first of the Guard's researchers but perfected by Tabitha, creating the Guard's legions of men and women to serve as serfs for the skyborne royalty aboard their flying city ships; many of which are more than a kilometre in their largest dimensions and thanks to the miracles of favourite are some of the largest flying machines ever designed by humanity. Many others were born of those grown serfs. It is of course, only to be expected; who would want to live aboard cramped and dark ships where space is at a premium of their own free will to be subject to the foul tempers of angry, embittered reactionary zealots seething over their lost thrones.

Most of them are raised to love and adore their lords, to think of their treatment as normal, desireable, and that it is in fact; their enemies who are wrong to live the way they do.  Coupled with a bit of psychic messaging embedded into their propaganda and their media, this is quite effective, and ensures that the Guard has a massive population of loyal, dependable serf families who will be willing, eager even to die for the Reaction.

Thus the Blackjackets are equipped cheaply, with the iconic black flak jacket in addition to the rest of their uniforms, goggles to keep debris out of their eyes while working the exterior of ships and see through their iconic smoke, bandannas to help with breathing cold air or black smoke, bayonets and trench knives, grenades, and a submachine gun. The most expensive part of their equipment is most assuredly their cavorite node belts that reduce their weight and allow for substantially faster movement, letting them cross the field of battle at greater speeds than most other infantry. Overall, save for the addition of some armor in the form of the flak jacket and the retirement of the bolt-action carbine in favor of the submachine gun, the Blackjacket's equipment has changed relatively little since the 1910s even if the vast majority of the Blackjackets were not born of the reactionary flight at all.

Wherever the Guard deploys military force, the Blackjacket is sure to take part in military operations.  And given the Guard's global dispersion and its ability to assemble its military on short notice and amass its forces, the Blackjacket can expect to fight just about anywhere, though they tend to be least happy about desert assignments due to the color of their uniforms; resulting in them purchasing hand portable fans and sweat cloths from the Empire's stores aboard their city ships ''en masse'' whenever they go somewhere hot.  For decades, the Blackjacket has proven to be a lynchpin of the Guard, and in the deeply stratified, socially immobile society of the Guard, these born and bred servants of course feel proud about their role in bringing back the Tsars, Kaisers, and Emperors of the world back to their rightful place in history. Generally, the best known Guard successes were ensuring that the Spanish king returned to power by throwing themselves into the Spanish Civil War when Franco's atrocities meant that most people would not so much as touch him and their military alliance with the Axis, partaking in the invasions of countries around the world and trying to establish imperial regimes that would submit to the Empire and to the Guard's diet of houses.

Armed with weapons made aboard factory ships with materials harvested from realms accessible with kinetic spline puncturing of spacetime, they would marshal out in their millions when the time finally came to bring about the coming of the divine destiny. While their relations with some parts of the Axis, such as the African League were less than harmonious due to their firm belief that the empires of old, of course  as vassal states of the Empire of the Rising Sun, should be restored, they were nevertheless the third great member of the Axis, and Rasputin and his council were soon renown as warmongers and despoilers as their legions launched incursions on every continent. Blackjackets in their many tens of thousands would slaughter the Panama garrison to prepare for the destruction of the canal as part of the Empire's master plan to ensure that the allied navies would remain divided; and the Blackjackets were often the stomping boot of trying to forcibly de-distribute land in the Soviet Union by restoring the land claims of old noble dynasties and forcing the common folk back into serfdom at gunpoint before being forced out once again when the Red Army's wrath was unleashed on them.

Even less helping their case were massacring Polish civilians in their attempt to restore the pre-WW1 borders of Eastern Europe when they abjectly refused to submit to the Hapsburg and Romanov puppet regimes. Perhaps most infamous in the Allied nations is the Rape of Paris where in an attempt to reverse the Axis' fortunes; the 6th White Fleet arrived at the reclaimed French capital while most of the Allied forces were now in Germany and the Low Countries and slaughtered more than half a million civilians in a bacchanalia of violence and integralist morality enforcement. It was a deranged dark mirror of the Paris Commune where for a time; the French Kingdom lived again and Maurras imposed his national catholic vision and sought to punish France for its original revolution.

In the Soviet Union, their cruelest atrocity was their attempt to restore the Tsardom in Leningrad, gunning down the "inheritors of the Petrograd rebellion", which was in essence; everyone and replacing them with Blackjackets relieved of their uniforms to mingle into homes as a new serf population for the Romanovs to pretend, for a number of days, that they were back in business. And in all of these atrocities, it was the Blackjackets who were the masked goons who did the bulk of the dirty work with childlike fervour to please their aristocratic masters, turning their guns on civilians and tearing down whatever had come after their time and was deemed to be an obstacle to the past. But the realisation that most Blackjackets were in essence, born to be slaves inspired more pity than rage in many of their enemies. Even when fighting to the bitter end to try and defend Tokyo and northern Honshu from the forces of modernity or when the Soviets took down the 1st Fleet over the Baltic.

Many blackjackets were integrated into the societies that took them prisoner, astonished at being treated like more than dependable butlers, but more are always being made to replace them. Such is the life of a cog in the machine.

## Just the Stats

 **Armour Type** | Infantry

 **Kill Reward** | 400

 **DPS** | 12