Name:Ludwig Sauer
Age:98Alias: The LichHe usually wears a rather disturbing mask which resembles a half-dissecated corpse, alongside a checkered tailored suit, with a tie who has skulls and crossbones over it. He's rather gaunt and thin, somewhate on the tall side. His voice is extremely gutural and raspy, due to an old shrapnel scar, and he has a noticeable Prussian accent when angered. He rarely parts away from a specially modded one-shot cane gun.
Skills/Abilities:- Die Hard War veteran: Even though he no longer can boast of all the energy and power of his youth, this man has survived the big War, and has also survived being a Soviet POW. As old and as frail as he is, he can still land good punches, and his ability to shoot weapons, which are on par with trained armed forces can still keep the GCPD special operatives at bay should he need to. He can also be quite tenacious even when injuried.
- Skilled Physician: After the war, however, Ludwig focused his life into how to heal and repair the fragile lives of others, eventually achieving great skill as a medic and a surgeon, with a focus on trauma surgery and limb-replacement prosthetics, to give others body parts that they had missed.
- Corpse Master Even so, his ambition to replace what was lost didn't end up there, and he also acquired great forensic skill. As he would say himself:"The dead talk to me more than the living sometimes." All in all, this goes with his obsession to restore the lives that he witnessed end, and he goes so far in this ill-fated quest he is able to steal corpses, and replacing their spines and brain with state-of-the art cybernetics, give them a mockery of life likeness. He is so skilled he can even scan some parts of the deceased people's brains as if they were wetware computers in order to salvage certain skills, but one thing is true: his "revenants" are all but mindless drones and not truly alive.
Biography: Ludwig Sauer was once a well meaning citizen wrong in the wrong place in the wrong era, namely Berlin during the Nazi Regime. Drafted like many youths in the war, he nevertheless complied to his so-called patriotic duty even though he had aspirations to be a clinician. Trapped in the siege of Stalingrad, Ludwig could only fight and despair as the war turned for the worst. The dead began to haunt him. The people he killed. The comrades that died. The innocents. All for what? A madman's idea of Third Reach, pitched against the monstrous Soviet war effort. There simply was no happy ending, and the release of death never came to him, as he was carted to become a Soviet prisoner in the aftermath. He could not bear anymore, his will to live faded. But the nightmares kept waking him up. And the corpses. They were everywhere. They wanted him to live more, so they could haunt him with their sneering, curled rigor-mortis smiles. He would never rest. They would eternally mock him.
Days became months, months became years. Ludwig was freed. He was allowed to have a semblance of life. Unable to move past his visions of corpses, he decided to learn the only thing that could alleviate new corpses appearing, medicine. Fashioning himself a semblance of tranquility, he applied himself to his talent and medicine, and soon it bore fruit. He made it, he became a renowned medic, earning respect that a decade ago would have thought he would never reach. But the dead... his comrades always waited for him. He could feel them, when he was alone. Corpses would never allow him to rest. So he began to live a double life. By day, he would save lifes. By night he would experiment with corpses.
There was no god, just humans, madness and science. Eventually his outings and bizarre schemes were lured into the open, and he was forced to flee his native Germany. Tossing and tumbling, he ended up in Gotham, a place he had been told that several people who seemed to never die lived, and with so many grime and crimes nobody would miss a few corpses...
At least that's what his fellow doctor,
Hugo Strange, told him...