Name– Johann Bellum
Age– 30
Gender– Male
Occupation– General in the Military
Faction– The Directory (formerly), now the White Guard
Species– Human
Personality– Johann is a quiet, but sociable man, who cares about his men like his own sons. As a soldier, however, he is disciplined and strict. Though he loved his men, he never hesitated to punish them severely. At home, he is a family man, as well, having a lovely wife and children. Once an ardent communist, Johann had a change of perspective as he grew up, seeing the horrors and atrocities committed by the Directory just to make communism work to near-perfection. He finally snapped further under the pressure of the White Guard in Pluto until all belief in the communist ideology disintegrated into dust. Johann also is respectful of the more classical renditioning of liberalism, having respect for the individual to a certain degree, but puts more respect to the law and to the state. He is also known for spending long hours in his study, consuming book after book filled with information.
Likes–
- The State
- Inhumanity
- Non-Humans
- Individualism to a degree
- Order
- Honour
- Self-serving individualists
- Communism
- Overly-individualistic people
- Hedonistic practices
- Disrespect
- Disorder and anarchy
- Treachery
Physical Description– Bellum is an average-sized man, but for a general, he isn't as muscular. He has a slender body, but still, muscular enough. Johann's cheekbones are high and sharp, and his eyes are cold. He has short dark brown hair, usually waxed over and combed back. His eyes are as brown as his hair. His skin isn't too pale thanks to being a descendant of a family that constantly worked under the sun for innumerable generations, and has evolved under a tropical sun. His upper lip is fuller than the lower one, as well.
Standing at 175m and weighing at 60kg, Bellum proves to be quite light and thin, but he knows how to take advantage of his slenderness in situations which call for him to actually fight. From his chin all the way to his cheek and right below his right ear, he sustained a long scar he received when, as a child labourer, his face was cut open by a falling piece of metal.
History– Johann was born in the tropics of Southeast Asia as the eldest child of a tailor and a lawyer. His father, Christopher Bellum, was the descendant of a Federationist aristocrat, whose roots are connected to the First Consul of the Federation. Nobody knew this except anyone who bore the name of Bellum. Johann was born as a child indoctrinated early into the communist ideology since age three, when he first began attending classes, thanks to the amount of money his father had poured into his education. At the age of twelve, Johann was what could be called an extremist of the communist ideology. He advocated for the inhumane treatment of the White Guard, and called for an absolute peace between Mankind and the Coalition. At the ripe age of thirteen, he began to work as a child labourer in a factory to allow his siblings to study. Of course, this was bad for Johann, as he always sustained great injuries in his time working in the factories. He began showing muscle at the age of fourteen, but he never grew in terms of muscle mass since then.
In school, he had an incident involving five books banned by the government, two being political books, another being a physics textbook, and a history textbook. The last book was the Holy Bible, a mysterious book. He was discouraged by a friend from reading it in public, so when he returned home, his head held high, he read it and did his best to scoff at it, but he couldn't, and at a young age, his visions for a Marxist utopia fell. At the age of fifteen, when he finished reading the books on history and politics, he tried to keep his beliefs stable with a pack of weak glue. He kept the Bible around, but never truly read it for a long time.
He entered college as an economist, hoping to solve the ever-increasing problems with the communist government and economy, but found economics to be useless. Instead, he began using his knowledge in mathematics, helped by his book on physics, to go and fight for the cause that slowly died inside his mind. He joined the gunnery corps, immediately being the most prominent soldier, despite spending more time in the ancient libraries than in the training field. His first battle came when he was eighteen, when he was sent to the forts of Sevastopol to garrison it against the White Guard when the White Guard attacked the fort. When Bellum stepped up nervously with a very odd plan to use deception and mobility to his advantage, a plan that seemed to border on fear and retreat. Lacking any other option, the general accepted his proposal, and using wild and severely angled manoeuvres, Johann managed to direct the army into the seemingly-impossible flanks of the enemy, and proceeded to crush the first army while the reserve army surprised and defeated a second White Guard force with minimal losses. Thanks to this, he was promoted to captain just right before the White Guard invasion force in Sevastopol was defeated.
He was assigned to attack the city of Stalingrad next to liberate it from the White Guard, who had captured it earlier. With his own units, he coordinated with a cavalry and infantry unit to take a strategic hill overlooking three key points of the city on the western bank. With heavy artillery pieces, the main bulk of the battery flung shells at these key points as the rest of the army went ahead to take it. Lighter, mobile artillery moved around from flank to flank, advancing through breeches in the enemy lines, inflicting damage, then retreating before they were spotted again. Johann's unit became one of the most elite units in the Bolshevik Army immediately after several other engagements, and at the ripe age of twenty-six, young Johann Bellum became the Commander of the Artillery Corps. His strategies exceeded further than gunnery, however, and soon, he began to hold infantry and armoured cavalry units until at the age of twenty-seven until he became General of the Shock Armies. At the age of twenty-eight, he became the Third Field Marshal of the Bolshevist Armies, and was given command over four armies when Pluto was invaded by an entire White Guard force.
Johann never underestimated his opponent. He reached Pluto eventually, and prepared for battle. In the first year of the campaign, all went well, but Johann also felt that the enemy wasn't giving their best yet. They won battle after battle, but he still felt empty. On New Years' Eve, however, right when the Bolshevist Armies thought that victory was certain, the actual main bulk of the White Guard forces advanced. The softened and comfortable Bolsheviks were taken by surprise, and they were pushed back by the initial assault. Johann desperately tried defending his flanks, but his men were demoralised by the millions of shells dropping around them, and weakened by the long rest they had. Within the first week, barely ten thousand White Guard soldiers were killed, while six hundred thousand of the eight hundred thousand Bolshevik soldiers were killed off and/or imprisoned. The White Guard destroyed drop-off locations, comm towers, satellites, and orbital docks. Bellum, however, regained control, but it was too late: majority of his forces were gone, and he was left to defend several strategic forts. As his men were slaughtered, and as his men slaughtered others, he began to break. Propaganda leaflets from White Guard planes affected him badly, as well, and tens of thousands flocked to the White Guards' side, disillusioned with communism. He then picked up the book he refused to read for the past several years to look for some sort of answer, and at the end of the second year, his beliefs crumbled, and in its place was nothing at first. He contemplated suicide, realising that his beliefs were nothing but a beautiful but foolish lie. Eventually, however, after months of thinking, in the place of the ruins where the beliefs of communism lay destroyed, a new belief was constructed: a belief of grandeur. In his mind, he built a utopia grander than any other utopia. He began to hold secret masses with his soldiers, who began to convert to the religion, and eventually baptised himself as a Roman Catholic in the cold battlefields of Pluto.
His beliefs were eventually publicised in a memoir he published, and the White Guard began to speak to him. All engagements stopped, but none outside of Pluto knew this. Bellum sent his adjutant back to Terra to seek a way to get his men out of the freezing cold, to use propaganda to his advantage and hopefully start a wild revolution. The revolution, however, was not publicised. His adjutant secretly returned with a message in hand, one coming from two Defence Ministry members and multiple high-ranking military officials.