Thief

**Key Features** | »Optical camouflage cloak (poncho)»Improvised deciphering device (from Cracker Jack box)»Butterfly knife (Concealed)»Tattooed guide for hijacking»Permission to join from mother (forged)

*"You see, when you take a thousand dollars from a man at once, he will notice it immediately. But if you take just one dollar per day, if you drain it as it comes, you can take a million and they won't even know it."*

- Nascha "Nasty" Wauneka, Thief

## Tactical Analysis

* **Sticky Fingers**: Thieves are unconventional Continental troops. Their primary role is to stand near enemy buildings and slowly drain the enemy's resources. She can stay there indefinitely, continuously draining resources until the enemy is broke. With her ability to pretend to be a civilian while moving and remain cloaked while stationary, this is easier than one might think.

* **Grand Theft Auto**: Thieves carry concealed butterfly knives, letting them jump into an enemy vehicle, shank the crew, and commandeer it. However, she cannot handle the complexity of an average modern war machine all by herself, so all she can use the vehicle for is to sneak into an enemy base undetected.

* **Non-Violent Crime**: Thieves are not front-line troops, and should never be sent into combat. They have no means of defending themselves and they wear virtually no protection, which can be a problem if the enemy notices them. On the other hand, enemy soldiers will not usually open fire on teenage girls, unless specifically ordered to.

* **Two-Week Waiting Period**: Following a friendly fire incident in Texas, thieves have been forbidden from carrying firearms due to their lack of experience with them; consequently, there are no heroic upgrades for thieves. There's also that pesky background check.

## Operational History

After the death of President Ackerman, the Allied Nations realized that they had something of a P.R problem on their hands in the United States of America. Insane though he may have been at the end, the American president was loved by most Americans, and the news that Ackerman had come within a hair of destroying Moscow and shattering the tentative Allied-Soviet ceasefire was kept carefully under wraps. It did not take a genius to realize that the enthusiastic American support for the Allied cause would evaporate quickly in the wake of Ackerman's death unless the Allies could turn things around with the various groups that made up the American people, and quickly. Reaching out to one in particular within a week, the basics of the Native American Reform Act were ironed out, and less than two weeks after the war's end, the act was instated.

The N.A.R.A was created to reach out to the Native Americans, especially those still living on reservations within the U.S. Chronically impoverished and poorly educated, the Native Americans were thought to be the perfect beneficiaries of a great public works campaign. In one of the first great adaptations of wartime S.P.A.M construction methods, the Allied Nations deployed construction crews to more than two hundred reservations to construct schools, from preschool age to two-year colleges, and hospitals, staffing them with volunteers from all over the Allied sphere of influence. All Native Americans under the age of thirty who did not already possess a college degree were to go to one of the newly constructed schools until they earned a degree. Meanwhile, massive Allied subsidies ensured that education would be affordable for all Native Americans.

The second phase of the N.A.R.A then identified and deported all Native Americans under the age of twenty who lived outside the reservations to one of the Reform reservations. Orphans and those whose parents refused to move to a reservation were placed in Allied foster care centers. Within these schools, young Native Americans would receive world-class education in mathematics, science, social studies, and more, then sent on to one of the Reform colleges. Generous loans would provide for the new crop of well-educated Native Americans to seek out productive jobs, in the US or elsewhere in the Allied Nations, and hopefully invest back into their reservation communities. The Allied dream was to break the cycle of poverty in Native American reservations in one stroke and provide a model of reform for the impoverished native peoples of other Allied Nations.

Things went badly for the Allies from the very beginning. The history of relations between Native Americans and the United States government could generously be called uneasy, but to many Native Americans, the Allied Nations were even worse. The model N.A.R.A communities abandoned traditional tribal practices and customs in favor of politically correct modern democracy, and the Native Americans caught more than a hint of condescension from the predominately European teachers towards Native American practices, especially their spiritual beliefs. It was with no small amount of evidence that Native Americans protested the N.A.R.A almost immediately as an act of gross cultural imperialism intended to whitewash the Native Americans and turn them into model Allied citizens divorced from their heritage and customs.

More galling still was the second phase of the N.A.R.A. Many of the young men and women removed to the reservations had no desire to receive an Allied education or to be removed from the people and places they grew up around. A regrettably large number of such people came from poor backgrounds, whose parents simply couldn't afford to go with their children to a reservation they'd never heard of. Resentment flourished in the Reformed reservations, and more than a few Native Americans began to explore contacts with the Continental Revolutionaries. Although the Continentals represented a nation that had a spotty record at best with the Native Americans, many on the reservations nevertheless felt that the Continentals were increasingly becoming the lesser evil.

The relations between the two groups have thus been rather uneasy, though matters have begun to improve in recent months. The most visible sign of Native American support of the Continentals has been the enlistment of a number of young women in the Continental forces. Initially, an all-female gang known as the Coyotes that had been deported en masse by the Allies decided to lend their streetwise skills to the wily Continentals, but a number of other women on the reservations have begun to style themselves after the Coyotes, from learning how to use a butterfly knife safely to acquiring a number of covert - or criminal - skills to fight back at the Allies. Despite considerable reluctance from the more conservative elements of the Continentals to allow such young women to ply their skills in combat situations, the Coyotes and their mimics have already begun to prove the value of their highly unconventional range of skills.

The Allies, being the Allies, of course, have completely failed to make the connection between the Coyotes and the N.A.R.A and assume that the Continentals have stooped to simply strong-arming local criminals into their organization.

## Behind the Scenes

One of the most unusable units in the original Red Alert made useful.

## Just the Stats

 **Armour Type** | Infantry

 **DPS** | 5

 **DPS** | N/A