Post by Arkadiy Sokolov on Sept 23, 2011 16:37:30 GMT -6
Tell us about yourself, if you please.
Name/alias: Lockheed
Age: 19
How long have you been RPing? At least five years now.
Do you have any other characters on the site? Ashe Kandor and Atticus. So many “A” characters, aaaagh.
Your character: bare bones.
Name: Arkadiy Vasiliyevich Sokolov
Age: 22
Location: Stella’s Freedom Headquarters, Chicago
Immune or Carrier? Immune
Skills: Astral Projection, Assimilation
Status: single and ready tomingle be utterly intimidated by the thought of a relationship
Face Claim: John Francis Daley
Picture:
Brief appearance description: In spite of the training that all Stella’s Freedom operatives undergo, Arkadiy has a true geek physique. He can hardly build up much muscle to speak of, and his sparse eating habits make him thin as a rail. This, compiled with the fact that his height has never cracked the six-foot mark, and that he sports obvious dimples whenever he so much as smirks, makes him often look younger than he is. Both his hair and eyes are a dark brown, almost black, and though his skin is fairly pale, he does have some tanning capacity.
Let's really get inside their head...
Personality: Arkadiy’s default state is bubbly and excited. He’s a naturally energetic person, and gets jazzed up about everything from finding new scrap parts to having a successful raid to eating chili instead of the regular chicken soup. This cheery enthusiasm often makes him come across as a ditz, and this is true to a certain extent. Arkadiy can be naïve or oblivious to things that are apparent to everyone else, particularly in social situations where much is left unspoken. He’s put his foot in his mouth on more than one occasion, only to realize what he said two seconds later and fervently apologize.
However, when it comes to dealing with the mechanical, Arkadiy is tremendously intelligent. He loves creating new inventions using pieces of old ones; to him, scrap parts are toys, and an object that’s no good for its original use is a welcome challenge. He can stay in his room for days when he starts tinkering, and won’t emerge until his creation is complete. He might not be able to invent things with the intuition and ease of a Technophile, but engineering is Arkadiy’s passion, and it shows in everything he makes.
Unfortunately, Arkadiy doesn’t have much fighting ability to balance out his brainpower. He doesn’t have the muscle to handle high-caliber firearms for long, and you can forget about melee. He isn’t mentally suited to combat, either; Arkadiy balks at hurting anyone directly (and at the thought of being hurt himself), and prefers to avoid conflict when he can. His first instinct is to run and hide instead of fight, and though he’s aware that this makes him a coward, he can’t get over his aversion to fighting. Creating weapons for Stella’s Freedom is as much as he can realistically contribute to their fighting force.
Likes:
hot cocoa
working with his hands
techno music
snakes
logic puzzles
meeting new people
Dislikes:
alcohol (leading people to think he can’t truly be Russian)
fighting or athletic activity
country music
dolphins (he’s quick to point out they’re bigger assholes than you’d think)
olives
making people angry/hurting their feelings
Strengths:
highly intelligent
hard-working
gentle-hearted
Weaknesses:
chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome
insecurity (because he knows he could easily be replaced by a Technophile)
cowardly; freezes up in combat
Fears:
dying
being considered “obsolete” or useless
bees (he’s allergic)
Family:
Father: Vasiliy Sokolov—Infected
Mother: Galina Sokolov (neé Rezanov)—Infected
Aunt: Sezja Rezanov—presumed deceased at 34
History:
In the 2030’s, Russia was struggling to catch up to the rest of the world’s economic surge. A string of particularly harsh winters had crippled transportation and production, and had taken their toll on the population, as well. The price of food and utilities went up and up, and support for the government went down and down. Amidst the rising tension and financial problems, a young Moscow couple had another, more personal issue: what to do with their son.
At first, Arkadiy’s endless fiddling with anything within reach looked like the tactile exploration of any other toddler. His parents didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until he started disassembling the child safety locks—and putting them back together with no trouble. Fascinated, Vasiliy and Galina bought him model construction sets when he was a little older; within a few days, their living room was filled with creations that would have inspired Rube Goldberg. As he grew, his projects became more and more advanced, and he spoke excitedly to his parents about the application he’d discovered for this or the theoretical usage for that. Yet despite this enthusiasm, Arkadiy’s performance in school was less than impressive. There was too much repetition and memorization and not enough investigation, not enough action. His parents could see that he needed a different environment to flourish—just as they could see that Russia was rapidly becoming unstable. They resolved to get out of the country as soon as they could.
“As soon as they could” turned out to involve three years of waiting for their visas and haggling with government officials, but at long last they were in the clear. At ten years old, Arkadiy watched the colorful onion domes of St. Basil’s cathedral shrink beneath him through a tiny plane window, and tried to imagine skyscrapers and a green lady made of metal in their place.
His parents chuckled when he asked them what New York City would be like. “We aren’t going to New York, Arkasha. We’re going to Chicago.”
Establishing themselves in America turned out to be somewhat harder than expected for clan Sokolov. They had the help of Galina’s sister, Sezja, a Chicago citizen for six years, but their problems were more intangible than finding a house or landing a job. It was about Vasiliy getting used to being a repairman instead of a contractor, about Galina dealing with coworkers who openly compared her to a mail-order bride they knew once, about kids giggling over Arkadiy’s accent behind their notebooks. It was nothing as serious as the race riots or pogroms that everyone read about in history class, of course. Merely disconcerting, quietly discouraging; you are different from us.
The common response to this subtle isolation would be dismay, even anger. For Arkadiy and his endless reservoirs of energy, the answer was just to laugh along with everyone. If he pretended like the covert mockery didn’t hurt, the game would be no fun for them anymore. Eventually their barbed comments stopped flying, and they left in search of easier prey—and a few kids who’d felt those barbs themselves started to sit with Arkadiy at lunch and ask to play video games together. He showed his rising grades to his parents with a smile, told them how he had made the best paper airplane in class today and how he was so excited for his first sleepover in America. And gradually, they stopped coming home with an aura of frustration, and started telling him about the friends they’d made at work and sharing funny stories. The apartment they had found began to transition from a temporary stop into a place where he could spend his days growing into the person he’d become.
Then, when he was twelve, the virus hit.
The Sokolovs had become well-acquainted with riots during their time in Russia; when they saw the panic spreading on the news and countless people fleeing west, they began stocking up on food, water, supplies, medicine, anything they could get their hands on. They hunkered down in their apartment, fully prepared to wait out the chaos that was sweeping across the city. His parents told Arkadiy to think of it like a game, to see how quiet he could be and how little he needed to use the lights. Four stories above the ground, with a sturdy locked door separating them from the world, they should have been safe. And they would have been, if it was merely riots they had to worry about.
They began to hear sounds coming from other apartments. Growls, then roars and screams from the Liedhoffs in 518. Prayers and pleads squeezed out through sobs from 513, which were then abruptly silenced. A single, merciless gunshot from Kyle and Estella Uther, right across the hall in 520. Galina had covered Arkadiy’s ears and hugged him close. “It’ll be all right, Arkasha. You’re safe, we’re safe. Just stay quiet.” He had tried to smile up at her, tried to be strong. But he could see her skin getting pallid, could see his father sweating and shivering. They both felt blazing to the touch, their eyes were gaining a glassy sheen. They were sick. But he was not.
On the third night, as he lay stiffly in his pitch-dark room, he wondered what sounds would come from their apartment when his parents crossed the same line that the others had. He would scream as they burst into his room, but it would stop as they tore out his throat. Did ripping flesh make a sound loud enough to hear through walls? Howls would, he’d heard howling on the street just the night before. They might howl as they tore his tender muscle from his legs, snapped his bones, coated their arms in his blood.
And Arkadiy suddenly couldn’t stay in that apartment one minute longer.
Heart hammering, Arkadiy slipped out of his bed and carefully navigated the way to his door. He kept his eyes fixed on his slumbering father as he crept through the living room, waiting for him to open his eyes and spring towards him with a snarl. Tearing his muscle. Snapping his bones. Coating their arms in his blood.
He groped for the doorknob, whipping open the door and scrambling out into the hall, fear overtaking stealth. He flung himself at the doorway across the hallway, limbs starting to shake. One gunshot, there had only been one, maybe there was a chance—
“Let me in!” His voice was high, strained, but he didn’t dare shout. “Please, please, let me in!” Tearing his muscle. Snapping his bones. Coating their arms in his blood.
The door swung inward; Arkadiy fell forward and nearly kissed the cold metal barrel of a gun. Through tear-clouded eyes he saw Kyle Uther’s brow furrow, and then a strong arm swept around his shoulders and ushered him inside. The sound of the deadbolt sliding into place behind him was the loudest thing he’d ever heard.
Arkadiy learned three things from living with Kyle very quickly. One: he was not to go against Kyle’s orders. Two: he would not be coddled like a child and must pull his own weight. And three: he was not to bring up the scorch marks on Kyle’s porch. The first and only time he did, Kyle’s gaze seemed to turn inward and stare into a dark crevasse of sorrow. “It was my wife,” he’d replied, and those four words were enough to make Arkadiy backpedal away from the topic as fast as he could.
Kyle would sometimes vanish for an entire day; when Arkadiy asked where he was going, he only said that he was bringing freedom to the damned. He shook his head whenever Arkadiy requested if they could try to check on his parents or find his friends. He didn’t even let Arkadiy out of the apartment until the day, some months after he took the Russian boy in, that he announced that the building had been “cleared”. Only then did he allow Arkadiy to come on scavenging missions with him, sweeping the entire building for anything they could use. With fresh materials in his hands, Arkadiy began to craft new inventions; the prospect of making things that might make the austere Kyle see him as useful ignited his old energy. During Kyle’s “Freedom sprees”, as Arkadiy began calling them, he holed up in the apartment and built, letting his mind run wild.
Months became years, and Kyle started bringing other survivors home with him. Some would leave with him to go on raids, others searched the city for more supplies, and a few stayed in the apartment and helped Arkadiy with his projects. He wasn’t sure who started using the phrase “Stella’s Freedom”, but it caught on quickly, and soon their little organization was straining the seams of Kyle’s apartment. A week before Arkadiy’s fifteenth birthday, Kyle announced that he’d found a different home for them all. They had packed their bags and were on the road the next day, a loose, frightened bunch, their eyes darting around their surroundings—and always returning to their stoic leader.
Getting to the Walgreens, as it turned out, was the least difficult part of their venture. The real struggle was staking their claim in the area. It had taken days of fighting until the Infected got the message that this was no longer their turf; it took weeks more for Stella’s Freedom to clear out a 12-block strip, purging Infected from their dens from the river to the John Hancock center. The ordeal forged them from a scraggly, mismatched group into a band of survivors that stood by each other without question.
As their ranks grew, so did their knowledge of the Infected; the others reported whatever they had found to Arkadiy, who used it to make better and better weapons. Over time, he became their de facto head of intelligence, a position he still occupies even after Kyle’s disappearance.
What do you think of this situation? It could be worse!
RP sample: Nnnnno!
Name/alias: Lockheed
Age: 19
How long have you been RPing? At least five years now.
Do you have any other characters on the site? Ashe Kandor and Atticus. So many “A” characters, aaaagh.
Your character: bare bones.
Name: Arkadiy Vasiliyevich Sokolov
Age: 22
Location: Stella’s Freedom Headquarters, Chicago
Immune or Carrier? Immune
Skills: Astral Projection, Assimilation
Status: single and ready to
Face Claim: John Francis Daley
Picture:
Brief appearance description: In spite of the training that all Stella’s Freedom operatives undergo, Arkadiy has a true geek physique. He can hardly build up much muscle to speak of, and his sparse eating habits make him thin as a rail. This, compiled with the fact that his height has never cracked the six-foot mark, and that he sports obvious dimples whenever he so much as smirks, makes him often look younger than he is. Both his hair and eyes are a dark brown, almost black, and though his skin is fairly pale, he does have some tanning capacity.
Let's really get inside their head...
Personality: Arkadiy’s default state is bubbly and excited. He’s a naturally energetic person, and gets jazzed up about everything from finding new scrap parts to having a successful raid to eating chili instead of the regular chicken soup. This cheery enthusiasm often makes him come across as a ditz, and this is true to a certain extent. Arkadiy can be naïve or oblivious to things that are apparent to everyone else, particularly in social situations where much is left unspoken. He’s put his foot in his mouth on more than one occasion, only to realize what he said two seconds later and fervently apologize.
However, when it comes to dealing with the mechanical, Arkadiy is tremendously intelligent. He loves creating new inventions using pieces of old ones; to him, scrap parts are toys, and an object that’s no good for its original use is a welcome challenge. He can stay in his room for days when he starts tinkering, and won’t emerge until his creation is complete. He might not be able to invent things with the intuition and ease of a Technophile, but engineering is Arkadiy’s passion, and it shows in everything he makes.
Unfortunately, Arkadiy doesn’t have much fighting ability to balance out his brainpower. He doesn’t have the muscle to handle high-caliber firearms for long, and you can forget about melee. He isn’t mentally suited to combat, either; Arkadiy balks at hurting anyone directly (and at the thought of being hurt himself), and prefers to avoid conflict when he can. His first instinct is to run and hide instead of fight, and though he’s aware that this makes him a coward, he can’t get over his aversion to fighting. Creating weapons for Stella’s Freedom is as much as he can realistically contribute to their fighting force.
Likes:
hot cocoa
working with his hands
techno music
snakes
logic puzzles
meeting new people
Dislikes:
alcohol (leading people to think he can’t truly be Russian)
fighting or athletic activity
country music
dolphins (he’s quick to point out they’re bigger assholes than you’d think)
olives
making people angry/hurting their feelings
Strengths:
highly intelligent
hard-working
gentle-hearted
Weaknesses:
chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome
insecurity (because he knows he could easily be replaced by a Technophile)
cowardly; freezes up in combat
Fears:
dying
being considered “obsolete” or useless
bees (he’s allergic)
Family:
Father: Vasiliy Sokolov—Infected
Mother: Galina Sokolov (neé Rezanov)—Infected
Aunt: Sezja Rezanov—presumed deceased at 34
History:
In the 2030’s, Russia was struggling to catch up to the rest of the world’s economic surge. A string of particularly harsh winters had crippled transportation and production, and had taken their toll on the population, as well. The price of food and utilities went up and up, and support for the government went down and down. Amidst the rising tension and financial problems, a young Moscow couple had another, more personal issue: what to do with their son.
At first, Arkadiy’s endless fiddling with anything within reach looked like the tactile exploration of any other toddler. His parents didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary until he started disassembling the child safety locks—and putting them back together with no trouble. Fascinated, Vasiliy and Galina bought him model construction sets when he was a little older; within a few days, their living room was filled with creations that would have inspired Rube Goldberg. As he grew, his projects became more and more advanced, and he spoke excitedly to his parents about the application he’d discovered for this or the theoretical usage for that. Yet despite this enthusiasm, Arkadiy’s performance in school was less than impressive. There was too much repetition and memorization and not enough investigation, not enough action. His parents could see that he needed a different environment to flourish—just as they could see that Russia was rapidly becoming unstable. They resolved to get out of the country as soon as they could.
“As soon as they could” turned out to involve three years of waiting for their visas and haggling with government officials, but at long last they were in the clear. At ten years old, Arkadiy watched the colorful onion domes of St. Basil’s cathedral shrink beneath him through a tiny plane window, and tried to imagine skyscrapers and a green lady made of metal in their place.
His parents chuckled when he asked them what New York City would be like. “We aren’t going to New York, Arkasha. We’re going to Chicago.”
Establishing themselves in America turned out to be somewhat harder than expected for clan Sokolov. They had the help of Galina’s sister, Sezja, a Chicago citizen for six years, but their problems were more intangible than finding a house or landing a job. It was about Vasiliy getting used to being a repairman instead of a contractor, about Galina dealing with coworkers who openly compared her to a mail-order bride they knew once, about kids giggling over Arkadiy’s accent behind their notebooks. It was nothing as serious as the race riots or pogroms that everyone read about in history class, of course. Merely disconcerting, quietly discouraging; you are different from us.
The common response to this subtle isolation would be dismay, even anger. For Arkadiy and his endless reservoirs of energy, the answer was just to laugh along with everyone. If he pretended like the covert mockery didn’t hurt, the game would be no fun for them anymore. Eventually their barbed comments stopped flying, and they left in search of easier prey—and a few kids who’d felt those barbs themselves started to sit with Arkadiy at lunch and ask to play video games together. He showed his rising grades to his parents with a smile, told them how he had made the best paper airplane in class today and how he was so excited for his first sleepover in America. And gradually, they stopped coming home with an aura of frustration, and started telling him about the friends they’d made at work and sharing funny stories. The apartment they had found began to transition from a temporary stop into a place where he could spend his days growing into the person he’d become.
Then, when he was twelve, the virus hit.
The Sokolovs had become well-acquainted with riots during their time in Russia; when they saw the panic spreading on the news and countless people fleeing west, they began stocking up on food, water, supplies, medicine, anything they could get their hands on. They hunkered down in their apartment, fully prepared to wait out the chaos that was sweeping across the city. His parents told Arkadiy to think of it like a game, to see how quiet he could be and how little he needed to use the lights. Four stories above the ground, with a sturdy locked door separating them from the world, they should have been safe. And they would have been, if it was merely riots they had to worry about.
They began to hear sounds coming from other apartments. Growls, then roars and screams from the Liedhoffs in 518. Prayers and pleads squeezed out through sobs from 513, which were then abruptly silenced. A single, merciless gunshot from Kyle and Estella Uther, right across the hall in 520. Galina had covered Arkadiy’s ears and hugged him close. “It’ll be all right, Arkasha. You’re safe, we’re safe. Just stay quiet.” He had tried to smile up at her, tried to be strong. But he could see her skin getting pallid, could see his father sweating and shivering. They both felt blazing to the touch, their eyes were gaining a glassy sheen. They were sick. But he was not.
On the third night, as he lay stiffly in his pitch-dark room, he wondered what sounds would come from their apartment when his parents crossed the same line that the others had. He would scream as they burst into his room, but it would stop as they tore out his throat. Did ripping flesh make a sound loud enough to hear through walls? Howls would, he’d heard howling on the street just the night before. They might howl as they tore his tender muscle from his legs, snapped his bones, coated their arms in his blood.
And Arkadiy suddenly couldn’t stay in that apartment one minute longer.
Heart hammering, Arkadiy slipped out of his bed and carefully navigated the way to his door. He kept his eyes fixed on his slumbering father as he crept through the living room, waiting for him to open his eyes and spring towards him with a snarl. Tearing his muscle. Snapping his bones. Coating their arms in his blood.
He groped for the doorknob, whipping open the door and scrambling out into the hall, fear overtaking stealth. He flung himself at the doorway across the hallway, limbs starting to shake. One gunshot, there had only been one, maybe there was a chance—
“Let me in!” His voice was high, strained, but he didn’t dare shout. “Please, please, let me in!” Tearing his muscle. Snapping his bones. Coating their arms in his blood.
The door swung inward; Arkadiy fell forward and nearly kissed the cold metal barrel of a gun. Through tear-clouded eyes he saw Kyle Uther’s brow furrow, and then a strong arm swept around his shoulders and ushered him inside. The sound of the deadbolt sliding into place behind him was the loudest thing he’d ever heard.
Arkadiy learned three things from living with Kyle very quickly. One: he was not to go against Kyle’s orders. Two: he would not be coddled like a child and must pull his own weight. And three: he was not to bring up the scorch marks on Kyle’s porch. The first and only time he did, Kyle’s gaze seemed to turn inward and stare into a dark crevasse of sorrow. “It was my wife,” he’d replied, and those four words were enough to make Arkadiy backpedal away from the topic as fast as he could.
Kyle would sometimes vanish for an entire day; when Arkadiy asked where he was going, he only said that he was bringing freedom to the damned. He shook his head whenever Arkadiy requested if they could try to check on his parents or find his friends. He didn’t even let Arkadiy out of the apartment until the day, some months after he took the Russian boy in, that he announced that the building had been “cleared”. Only then did he allow Arkadiy to come on scavenging missions with him, sweeping the entire building for anything they could use. With fresh materials in his hands, Arkadiy began to craft new inventions; the prospect of making things that might make the austere Kyle see him as useful ignited his old energy. During Kyle’s “Freedom sprees”, as Arkadiy began calling them, he holed up in the apartment and built, letting his mind run wild.
Months became years, and Kyle started bringing other survivors home with him. Some would leave with him to go on raids, others searched the city for more supplies, and a few stayed in the apartment and helped Arkadiy with his projects. He wasn’t sure who started using the phrase “Stella’s Freedom”, but it caught on quickly, and soon their little organization was straining the seams of Kyle’s apartment. A week before Arkadiy’s fifteenth birthday, Kyle announced that he’d found a different home for them all. They had packed their bags and were on the road the next day, a loose, frightened bunch, their eyes darting around their surroundings—and always returning to their stoic leader.
Getting to the Walgreens, as it turned out, was the least difficult part of their venture. The real struggle was staking their claim in the area. It had taken days of fighting until the Infected got the message that this was no longer their turf; it took weeks more for Stella’s Freedom to clear out a 12-block strip, purging Infected from their dens from the river to the John Hancock center. The ordeal forged them from a scraggly, mismatched group into a band of survivors that stood by each other without question.
As their ranks grew, so did their knowledge of the Infected; the others reported whatever they had found to Arkadiy, who used it to make better and better weapons. Over time, he became their de facto head of intelligence, a position he still occupies even after Kyle’s disappearance.
What do you think of this situation? It could be worse!
RP sample: Nnnnno!