Who is Krell?

[Project_Sardonicus]

A perennial question for aficionados of TMP, allow my take.

Towards the later stages of setting up the project with TEOTWAWKNI the project ran into two problems.

First of all what to do with recruits who had washed out of training, several times. Usually, these were pretty high-level members; ex-military or with other specialised skills who maybe shouldn't have been recruited due to psychological or physical issues.

Memory wiping wasn't that easy even for an organisation with psychics on call. And could you just stack them up in freeze tubes with no real use for them? Were you just putting trouble off for another world?

Secondly the traditional Project's approach to security was creating some concerns. Usually concealing large faccilties either hiding them or hardenining them. Could Prime Base it's self be protected if tens of thousands refugees would hear about it and turn up on it's door step? The more security you placed around a facility the more irresistible you made it. What were they hiding?

The answer was to make these sites as unattractive as possible. But could you really rely on a sign that read "beware of the radioactive dog" To keep humanity safe?

The answer to the 2 above problems was controversial. These untrainable members would be turned into "muftee squads" they would be placed in small groups of 10-20 near key facilities. With strict orders to maintain an absolute quarantine no one in or out until issued a specific coded instruction (they came to be known as Gort orders). These teams would lack any equipment to identify them as Morrow Teams. No fusion plants, no freeze tubes (they would stay awake as they would be needed at the point civilisation fell). In fact they were encouraged to make themselves as outlandishly threatening as possible. Some Muftee squads disguised themselves as biker gangs, another got their hands on a bunch of WW2 Nazi uniforms, one even dressed up as a sort of A team that shot straight.
They, of course, got plenty of guns, bullets and other cool tools. They were performing a useful job and at this stage in time no one really questioned who was responsible for their training and certainly not their loyalty.

As the world ended no one really noticed a dozen or so no go zones in a blasted landscape.

And no one noticed in the Morrow Project how a certain Kevin Robert Ellison a senior project planner had slipped out of head office. Nor paid attention to his last orders had been establishing these Mufftee squads, he had the only list of Gort codes. Fortunately, he never got the master list of all the project facilities but he had enough.

[mmartin798]

If you are looking for peoples take on who we think Krell is, here is my short bio on him:

Ernest Krell is a German-American ESPer born in 1940 with the ability to see the probable future. It was not uncommon that children born of German parents in the US were treated badly by other children once WW2 started up and Ernest was no exception. This experience made him quite cynical and he decided at a young age he needed to rely on himself. His EPSer ability manifested itself shortly after his 12th birthday. He honed and developed his ability on his own and eventually used this talent to quietly amass a vast fortune. Starting in the late 1960's, he started to lose money on investments that should have been successful. This troubled him and became a puzzle he needed to solve. He discovers that future events are being changed and, after many unsuccessful attempts, finds that there is another ESPer who does not only see the future, but rather travels back and forth into it. This man, Bruce Morrow, unknowingly becomes the enemy of Krell.

Any plans I make for the Warriors of Krell are based on this backstory. The events I have started to chronologize have Krell establishing large underground shelter communities that are funded by people buying shares to have a spot in them when the time is right (similar to VIVOS Indiana). He also has public security firms that operate above board, with a select and secret subset of employees that are his private armed forces. This group will secure his underground shelter prior to the war and under his order, kill those who invested, since all he needed was their money to fund construction and supplying the bunker. Krell also founded engineering, bio-engineering, medical technology and pharmaceutical mid-sized companies to develop and manufacture materials he would need when he opened the shelter. At that time his agents went out and started to claim territory and establish his empire. All the while, his deep seated desire to hurt Bruce Morrow and his meddling was the reason all his agents and their recruits sought out any and all information about Morrow and the Morrow Project.