April CR Meme

[singhelpers]

CR MEME

It’s CR Meme time! It's time to touch base with where players are at with their characters in game and look towards the future! While not a requirement, CR Memes are helpful in forging connections with others, along with general housekeeping for what characters are up to during their time in game.


Below is a helpful form to use in laying out your thoughts!

FORM

<b>Player Name:</b> Your name here. <b>Player Contact:</b> What’s the best way to reach you? <b>OOC Limits:</b> Any hard limits for RP go here. <b>Character Name:</b> Your character name here. <b>Canon:</b> Your character canon here. <b>Residence:</b> Where are they currently staying? <b>Notable CR:</b> Any notable/close CR you want to mention? Roomies? Canonmates? Sworn enemies? <b>Skills:</b> From your application, what skills do they have? <b>Aurora Feat:</b> If applicable. Add any further notes here! <b>Wanted CR:</b> Friends? Mentors? Hunting buddies? Lovers? State preferences here. <b>Unwanted CR:</b> Not keen on romance? Mortal enemies? State preferences here. <b>Day to Day:</b> Where can your character be found typically? Are they sitting in the old church? Out fishing in the Basin? What do they get up to? How do they try to pass the time? <b>The Story So Far / Plans:</b> What have they been up to lately? What are your plans for them? <b>Anything Else?:</b> You know what to do.

Comments

vasiliy yegorovich ardankin | original — historical/(secret) revenant

[m1895]

Player Name: Yasmine
Player Contact: PP bluehellgazette or DM redmaresociety on discord.
OOC Limits: Eye/nail/dental trauma, pet death/euthanasia, horse harm/distress/suffering/saying goodbye to. I'm going through a really really hard time right now with my mare and I can't deal with passing mentions ooc or ic of the last two.

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.

Residence: A pretty humble one-bedroom cabin on the outskirts of Milton proper, now complete with a grouse pen.
Notable CR: Lives with/is infatuated with/falling genuinely in love with Konstantin Veshnyakov (sputnik), otherwise has some acquaintances in town but isn’t really close to anyone else yet.
Skills:

• Emergency Medical Technician-Basic: Vasiliy's been an EMT-B for about a year now, and can handle trauma cases on his own. He lacks diagnostic skill. As of arriving in Milton, his skills have more or less graduated to the level of a paramedic's out of necessity - he does things like administer medication, suture, etc.
• Persuasion/Emotional Manipulation: Vasiliy is very, very good at appearing nonthreatening, being disarming, and persuading others; this ability made him a very talented interrogator.
• Marksmanship: Having been a Chekist, he's trained to handle and fire a handgun; he's more comfortable with a revolver than a semi-automatic, but can use either. Compared to the general population, he has a great aim; compared to his coworkers, he's about average—he's not on a sniper's level of skill, but he can be reasonably expected to hit a moving target in the chest if that's where he chooses to aim, for example.
• Interrogation: He's interrogated hundreds of people, and is excellent at convincing people to give him information—even if they have to invent it to do so.
• Hand-to-hand combat: Despite being (by modern American/Canadian standards) shorter of stature at 5'7", Vasiliy's a good fighter. He's not a master, but he knows enough about critical points and technique from his training in the NKVD to drop someone and/or get their arms behind their back very quickly—with the physical strength to back it up.
• Ice Skating: Feels relevant to mention given the setting. Vasiliy's been ice skating every winter since he was very little, so he's great at it.

Aurora Feat: Nope! He's a normie except for the ‘dying and coming back unharmed and unaging 75 years later’ thing.

Wanted CR:

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 - The Mukhtar Situation™ (described below) is presently a shitshow gearing up to be an even worse shitshow, and 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.

Day to Day:

Vasiliy’s quite active and collectivist, and has a strong desire to be helpful, so it’s safe to assume he’ll help if a community project (such as burial duty at the very beginning of the game or this most recent expedition to the resort area) pops up. He’s a trained EMT with modern-day medical knowledge, and hangs around town and goes along with expeditions so that he’s there in case of medical emergencies. Otherwise, he sets traps for rock ptarmigan out in the woods to catch them and put them in his and Konstantin’s grouse coop, splits logs for firewood out in the back yard (if it can be called a yard), and tries to train the stray German shepherd he ill-advisedly lured back to the cabin by offering him food.

The Story So Far / Plans:

Vasiliy's been here since the start of the story and was sort of keeping to himself like he did back in the U.S. aside from offering his services as an EMT. Things changed when Konstantin arrived and he took him in; they pretty much immediately hit it off and have over the past few months come to develop a genuine, deeper bond. He's started to adjust to actually living with someone for the first time in years and even built a henhouse Grouse House for ptarmigan he's been catching to keep the alien inhabiting Konstantin fed with fresh blood.

He's started meeting people through his ties with Kostya because of how outgoing he is, and I'd definitely like to continue threading out mutual acquaintanceships/meeting friends-of-Kostya because it's a plausible in for someone whose paranoia makes him reluctant to share much with other people.

This past month, Vasiliy was a part of the expedition out of Milton and into the resort town on the other side of the mines, offering medical assistance when needed and carrying back plenty of medications and emergency medical supplies—as well as cigarettes and proper winter clothing for his roommate—upon his return.

He also 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.

Anything Else?: Look at this actual photo of Vasiliy