Character Doodle: Dr. Zoust

Okay, so, World War II. You got your gaggle of German scientists under the employ of the Nazis. One of them is Dr. Sigfried Zoust. Quiet guy, smart, thinks he's bettering mankind, at least until after the war. Then he learns the truth about the concentration camps and denounces his affiliation with it all. Since he never actually engaged in any of those Crimes Against Humanity, he was exempted from the Nuremberg Trials.

Time passes, to the point it passes us by now. He's old but healthy, working out of an well-kept castle in Europe somewhere. Still into science, working to reanimate corpses but he's ethical about it: he only works on rabbits, uses the scientific method at all stages, and has a convenient-to-use incinerator to prevent any sort of mutant or monstrosity from getting far.

But the fact remains, he's an ex-Nazi scientist in a castle performing experiments to stave off death. Every superhero in the world comes to him first whenever evil sciency shit goes down. The foreign ones tend to be rude and pushy and prone to breaking equipment and liberating would-be flop-eared test subjects. The local ones knock on the door, ask to look around, maybe share a meal with the old man, and eventually get around to mentioning the gigantic rampaging cottontail that is lowering property values in Old Tokyo. He never knows anything about it of course, unless he's been watching the news, and even then the most he can offer is encouragement to defeat it.

Here's the thing. He's always been a bit naive, with the end of the war being one of the few gashes in his ever-growing optimism about humanity. He is also, at the core, a scientist. If something exhibits a reaction he didn't expect or desire, he stills observes it and writes about it. And naturally, castles don't pay for themselves. So he'll publish regularly about all the freakish things he's done to rabbits, with the expectation that some bright-eyed fellow will make something useful of his discoveries.

And when some less- than-moral nutjob uses this knowledge to cause a havoc (say, a pet-store clerk in Japan who is less than pleased about the abundance of robots in his neighborhood), Zoust doesn't know jack about it. Even if a link between the provocateur and his work is proven to exist, he's never followed up on the 'dead-ends' so he'd be useless on how to deal with it.

So remember kids: you see a Nazi scientist, you shoot the fuck.