Player Name: Yasmine
Player Contact: Discord strongly preferred - un: redmaresociety - followed by private plurk (bluehellgazette).
Pacing: I'm technically taking a hiatus this month and looking at a more mellow pace, but hopefully more active than I've been able to be recently.
OOC Limits: Eye/nail/dental trauma, pet death/euthanasia, horse harm/distress/suffering.

Character Name: Vasiliy Yegorovich Ardankin
Canon:

Original character - 1930s Russian historical/modern (2018) revenant. Info sheet here; the basic beats are—

Vasiliy is a Soviet ex-interrogator, fervent communist, and revenant–born in 1910, he served in Nikolai Yezhov’s NKVD from 1936-1940 as a ‘good cop’ interrogator responsible for emotional manipulation in the distinctly Soviet split style interrogation system: instead of beating confessions out of prisoners, Vasiliy approached them casually and with kindness, expressing sympathy and emphasizing that it was in their best interest (and their family’s) for them to sign the falsified confessions that would ultimately get them jailed or shot outright, justifying it to himself with the belief they’d be tortured until that happened anyway. When Yezhov fell from Stalin’s favor and was jailed and executed, the NKVD was purged just as it had been during Vasiliy’s time, and he was arrested, interrogated, and shot as an enemy of the state.

But his story didn’t end there–for reasons that aren’t clear to him, Vasiliy woke up lying on his back in the snow in the middle of nowhere in 2015, unharmed, carrying the documents of a man by the same name born in 1985. He’s spent the past three years unlearning Stalinism and coming to grips with the sheer magnitude of what he did, racked with overwhelming guilt and deep paranoia over being discovered and executed for what he did a second time. He trained as an EMT and immigrated to the US on a work visa two years after his return to the world of the living, and spent the year before his arrival in Milton working with Chicago municipal EMS in an unconscious effort to balance some of the cosmic harm he did while processing how he was summarily disposed of and living in fear of rediscovery, still a true believer in communism but now living in an environment in which traits that helped him survive in a police state are seen as deeply unusual and offputting - he is, more or less, living the same fate as the blobfish: a creature perfectly adapted to a high-pressure deep sea environment abruptly brought to the surface, regarded as ugly by fishermen from a very different environment for those same adaptations.

Aurora Feat: None - he's an absolute normie.

Wanted CR:

People with farming experience: Please for the love of god someone help him. Vasiliy has spent his entire life in the city, and so has his spouse housemate, Kostya. They have to have fresh blood to feed Kostya's alien parasite, so Vasiliy started trapping and keeping live ptarmigans in a pen he built - but he has no farming experience at all, and has been learning along the way.

Friends - it’ll take a lot of time because he’s very wary and guarded with new people due to the political atmosphere of the Stalin era, but he’s a good, loyal friend once the friendship is made. Vasiliy is a deeply lonely person, and has been since coming back—this has improved a lot since meeting Konstantin, but he still lacks a social circle and struggles to make attachments.

Fellow Russians - he’s awkward about this because there’s always a fear that they’ll recognize him as dated in a way specific to the 1930s and come one step closer to finding out what he did, so he continues to speak in English and only English, in which he doesn’t have any era-specific patterns of inflection because the language is entirely new to him. It raises questions, though, in scenarios with autotranslate like Milton - he could just speak Russian and be heard as fluent in whatever language the listener speaks, so why speak a language he isn’t fluent in and has periodic difficulties communicating in?

This pairs with a deep, deep homesickness and desperation to interact with people from his own culture, who share most cultural/societal norms and traditions with himself, to create a situation in which he’s torn between really wanting to interact and being afraid to interact, which is interesting to play out.

Someone with knowledge about dogs - On the expedition to Lakeside, Vasiliy made the questionable decision of using chips and jerky to gain the (wary, minimal) trust of a German shepherd who was left behind when his owner died, thinking that he would more or less immediately become a loyal companion who does whatever he asks, stands guard, etc. By the end of the week spent at the resort area, the dog, who was/is malnourished, came to associate him with food enough to follow him from a distance, all the way back to Milton.

The thing with that is that Vasiliy has never had a dog, and he's only interacted with strays and highly trained NKVD police dogs encountered in passing. His exposure to and impression of German shepherds is therefore that they're this ideal worker and companion of mankind in a very Soviet way simply by their basic nature and not that this is something that has to be like… meticulously trained and taught. Further, he wasn't really aware that they're kind of a one person breed, and didn't consider the fact that this dog is traumatized and already had a master it was bonded to, so it’s definitely an uphill battle with a very inexperienced person. Sort of a nightmare first dog situation.

He definitely needs help from someone who understands or has been around or even trained dogs to help him.

Other Working Class People: Having grown up in a tenement as the child of a seamstress and a factory laborer in the 1910s, as well as being a fervent communist acutely aware of social class and origin in every relationship, Vasiliy seeks out people who share his class background because he's much more at ease around them and doesn't struggle nearly as much to relate to them.

Unwanted CR:

Romance - he’s in a slowburn Thing with Konstantin Veshnyakov, and transitioning from deep infatuation to genuinely In Love With Him at the moment.

Found family - he's just not that kind of character.

Event Ideas:

I'm on the fence as to whether or not Vasiliy will be participating in raiding the caches and don't plan on doing anything with the lake creature, so I'll be focusing my attention on the glimmerfog.

Vasiliy is an EMT with about 6 months of more advanced medical training by now, and will be helping other interlopers - people who get hurt because of sleeplessness, event-unrelated injuries, etc etc. He's going to be afflicted by the glimmerfog himself, as well, which won't go well given his other issues. Vasiliy has post-traumatic stress disorder from A) his own imprisonment/interrogation/death, B) the extremely disturbing things he witnessed in Lubyanka prison and C) his own moral injury, and it recently got aggravated by being in the mines for a prolonged period of time, which combined several of his major triggers (being underground generally, cold/damp/mildewy/stale smelling environment, cavelike/underground acoustics).

I'm looking at having him experience hallucinations, but am still sort of figuring out how far they'll go and how deeply he'll be immersed in them/what, specifically, they will be. He may effectively end up reliving parts of the trauma, which is going to be pretty catastrophic. I'll probably only be doing 2 or 3 threads with this.

Anything Else?: I'm really hoping to get some more 'daily life'/realities-of-survival type threads going in addition to event stuff!