Characters of the Combine

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# Civilian Personnel

## High Council Speaker

### Vera Leocadia

*"The people know in their hearts what is best for the nation, but they do not always know how best to express it. That is my job: to sharpen a million voices into a single, clear sentiment."* - Vera Leocadia

Who is Vera Leocadia?

The question is ridiculous: everyone knows who Vera Capello Leocadia is. She is the pretty lady in the gold mask who speaks in a foreign language on the telly and makes Father laugh when she talks. She is the faceless idol of a godless people who speaks in meaningless euphemisms and nonsense jargon that amount to nothing of value. She is the adored face of millions of people, her mask put forth on banners and posters and signs and children's art projects. She speaks for a nation, and for all the peoples in it.

She is the Speaker for the United Technate's High Council, and she *is* the United Technate of the Americas.

Vera came from humble origins, a factory manager's daughter in Managua who took over his position as supervisor and union sympathizer when he was killed by hired mercenaries over a worker's right dispute. She established herself as a local political figure, one who sought to unite the assorted workers and people of the region against the corruption of both the Somoza dictatorship and the later Soviet dictatorship via assorted diplomatic maneuvers she came to call "winning hearts and minds" after hearing the phrase on an illegal Allied news program: descending on assorted revolutionary groups and workers and gathering them together, creating interconnected systems that would have such groups work in concert with each other, fulfilling goals that would ultimately benefit all parties involved while sacrificing as little public moral high ground as possible. Indeed, Vera's experience and lessons in this role would eventually prep her to become a major contributor to Technocratic success in Nicaragua, as she was one of the few who could create a logistical and organizational base for the numerous hastily created militias and revolutionary groups during the Revolution. Her Open Palm Party would become a later model for Technocratic integration of its heavily culturally diverse population, and when she was first elected in 1964 as Speaker it was said that "only Leocadia could speak in fifteen different languages and get them to all agree with each other."

Though officially her role is to state the official declarations of the United Technate and its stance on assorted international topics by way of the High Council, Vera is perhaps the closest the United Technate has to a de facto ruler. It is her responsibility to hear the words of the Technate's people, filtered through votes and meetings and public forum all the way up to the High Council, and compress them down to a single unified statement. It is a difficult task, and Vera rarely speaks - for her words must encompass the opinions of millions, not just her own. Often she simply stays silent, and marks the Technate's involvement through her physical presence: a golden face mask that erases her identity and marks her as a vessel for the nation, not an individual; a headdress of feathers in all the colours of the national province flags; a flowing geometric uniform stitched with words of peace in all the scripts and languages written or spoken within the Technate; and most of all bare arms, patterned with scars, faded bruises, and the marks gained from a lifetime of working with industrial machinery.

Behind the impassive gaze of her mask, Vera watches the Technate with warmth and the outside world with guarded neutrality. A sentence of support here, and the United Technate will officially declare the Pahit government an erroneous infection to which the Humanitarian Guard will gladly assist the Guilded Republic in curing. A few word of delicate anger there, and the Middle East will find itself beset by a hurricane of engineered super-metabolized locusts. An outright expression of hate, and the New Spanish Flu shall see the light. The Allies may court her and the Empire may dismiss her and the Soviets may chuckle at her, but it is through her that the United Technate officially speaks, and she cannot allow the United Technate to burn and revel in the glory of its own love when so much of her life has been spent building, not destroying.

And so the Technocrats keep their own council at the international events, and their leader speaks long and few. Their fiery rhetoric is hidden behind a gilded mask, and their fervent love for mankind is temporarily masked from the world.

## Senior Councillors

### Henri Hauptmann

 **Occupation** | Columbia Future Society representative

*"The strongest power in the arsenal of humanity is hope. Its hands can create weapons and its mind can devise death, but it is hope that gives meaning to these acts, and hope that allows humanity to face the other without turning them on itself."* - Henri Hauptmann

Henri Hauptmann is not native to the countries that formed the United Technate, but he played a significant role nonetheless in ensuring the creation of said Technate. Growing up in Germany as the son of a moderately well off merchant household and groomed for a life of medicine and surgery at the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Hygiene, he was noted by his peers as an odd sort of fellow, more inclined to pore over historical texts and political happenings in the newspaper rather than focus on his studies. While he graduated with honors from the Institute in 1931, it was his interest in politics, and not medicine, that drove him to immigrate to the United States, where he became embroiled with several political movements of dubious goals and beliefs before involving himself with the nascent Technocratic Party. It was the Technocrats he ultimately aligned himself with, rising through their ranks to ultimately become one of their most outspoken supporters at political rallies and meetings. Indeed, even as years passed and the glamour of Technocracy faded as a political idea, Hauptmann stuck with it, flying the flag and speaking to those who would listen at meetings increasingly devoid of members. He even used his family's connections with the Future Society to join their ranks, where his audience was somewhat more attentive... yet still entrenched in their own passive methods of bringing about a revolution of progress.

But though interest in his ideas failed to spark interest in the Northern Hemisphere, they caught fire in the Southern Hemisphere - notably the politically fraught nations of Central America. Courted by both capitalistic and socialist states, technocracy seemed to hold potential as an almost mythical third way, one that when interpreted differently could court both the populists and the landed elite. And so Hauptmann moved south, to fan the flames of a new Technocratic Party to Mexico...and to Guatemala...and to Costa Rica and beyond. When the Society schismed, it was no surprise to the group that Hauptmann stood with the activist side: he already had the ambition and the message. All he needed was a little funding, and a little influence.

To most of the Future Society's activist members, and to most of the world at large, Henri Hauptmann is thus a firebrand and an agitator: his words would prove the foundation of much of the Technate's jargon, and even when taking a backseat to Vera's declarations his presence is unmistakable. Those in favor of him say his presence on the High Council over six years after the end of the revolutions is merely a testament to his ability to hold his own in debates of policy and outcomes: those not in favor of him or the Technate whisper about revolutionary circles and powers behind powers.

For those who have interacted with him personally, however, there is another side: a proud but tired man, content to sit in the background and only lightly press on the pulse of national affairs. Henri Hauptmann was invested in politics for power, yes, but there was always something more for him. For Hauptmann, politics was a fundamental question of human nature, a philosophical and biological oddity: could one overcome the drive for power? Create a stable platform that bested humanity's natural drive to hunt and divide itself into tribes, to use its own ferociousness and independent nature against it to create a less political world? In truth he does not know the answer, though this is private even to those who know him personally: the Technate has not been around long enough to prove itself yet, and while Henri sees the golden spires and the wonders of science he also sees the destruction and the in-fighting, the hubris as well as the pride. He hopes that it will not end up being another revolution in a long history of revolutions. He hopes that their goal will not blind them to their path. He hopes that that one day his actions will be accounted for, and that he will not be found wanting for having made them.

He does not know if the Technate will prevail in the long run, but he holds hope that it will.

### Heberto Castillo

*"...It about convincing society that there's paths and that, if these don't exist, we can make them on the way."* - Heberto Castillo

### Humberto Fernandez

*"We live in a modern era of Space Exploration. This is not an hypothesis but a reality that absorbs the attention of all peoples... the message to our youth is categorical; Prepare by proper training to accomplish your mission in our era"* - Humberto Fernandez Moran

### Leda Melendez

*"..."*

## Other Notables

### Ray Kroc

 **Occupation** | McBurgerKong CEO

*"As long as you're green, you're growing. As soon as you're ripe, you start to rot."* - Ray Kroc

It has been said that good food is the stuff that brings all of humanity together - if it's true, then McBurgerKong is the single most largest alliance on earth. Whether in Imperial Tokyo, Allied New York, Disputed Washington DC, or in League Africa, almost anywhere you go the world-spanning fast food industry has a store ready to sell you a happy meal. And the famous head of McBurgerKong Enterprises is Ray Kroc, CEO, Entrepreneur, and honorary leader of the Combine.

An entrepreneur by birth, Kroc held down many jobs and many businesses over his lifetime, giving him a keen and shrewd understanding about how people thought when it came to business. During his early years, he was a friend to his now semi-enemy Walter Disney, and grew up marveling in wonder at the manufacturing capability of the Ford plants in Illinois. As a young man, he sold almost everything under the sun from apples to scented zucchini candles, and it was his skill at sales that would earn him a membership in the Columbia Future Society. But it was in World War 2 that he made his big break. While working as a financial advisor for a small fast food company called McDonalds, Kroc noticed that a nearby competitor, a small local food stand known as McBurgerKong down the street from his Chicago restaurant, was outdoing his in sales. Investigation revealed that the new stand was making their burgers from "Super Monkey Meat" (in reality, imported beef meat from Africa), which because of it's unusual biological makeup actually produced tastier and more filling burgers than at Kroc's place. Intrigued, Ray began to learn more of the stand, and in 1954 came to realize that he was competing with a potential gold-mine.

As the McDonalds fast food franchise seemed to have no interest in expanding, Ray Kroc cut ties before joining McBurgerKong. Using his financial skills, and putting into practice his theories of applying mass-production techniques to the kitchen, he was quickly able to rise through the ranks, until finally in 1957 he outright bought the franchise from its owners. Slowly, the franchise gained in popularity, sweeping first the state, then the country, and then the world by storm, with Kroc as the leader.

(The Combine)

### Sir Julian Huxley

*"We shall start from new premises. … The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps transhumanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature."* - Julian Huxley

# Military Personnel

## Military Councillors

### Amanda Diwali

 **Occupation** | Military General, Infantry Division

*"Don't give me soldiers that hate the enemy. Motivation by desperation and anger is weak, self-destructive garbage. Give me soldiers that love their brothers and sisters in battle. Give me soldiers that love their families and the society they fight for, and whose only thoughts of the opposition are pity and determination."* - Amanda Diwali