Post by Strakh Konstantin on Feb 16, 2013 14:39:13 GMT -5
Player: Meggido
Contact: PM this account or Vladislav’s
Intentions: Villain.
Background
Name: Strakh Konstantin
Race: Human
Age: 46
Tier: 3
Social
Place of Birth: Rynok
Allegiances: Himself first, and then whomsoever's winning the war
Aspirations:
Nicknames: Twiggs. Fearmonger. “GGAHHHHHH”
Titles: Information Specialist.
Relatives: Alexander Konstantin (father, deceased). Minerva Konstantin (Mother, deceased)
Significant Other: None.
Mental
Personality: Takes utter delight in another person's fear. He tends to be quiet, reserved, and soft spoken, and when he does speak it's often to prod or poke fun at others.
Likes: Terrifying others, 'cooking' the best 'tasting' fear. Sitting in the dark. Books. Soft acoustic music.
Dislikes: Loud noises. Bright lights.
Strengths: A keen observer and profiler even without his magical abilities. Eidetic memory.
Weaknesses: Has a tendency to get under the skin of those he works with, not very good at making friends.
Physical
Major Details: Gaunt. Pasty, Pale skin. 6'5'' . Waist length black hair. Irises have a yellow hue.
Appearance: Strakh has filed his teeth to sharp points because it makes his appearance even more unsettling. His hair is usually kept up in a bun, or a simply left dishevelled if he thinks it'll help make someone uncomfortable during an interrogation. Very thin, very little muscle on his body. Tends to wear dress slacks and a black dress shirt. A black tie, if he's working. If it's an interrogation, he might go for a more tattered look, and for outer wear he has a thick cape and hood.
Natural Abilities: Natural human abilities
Strengths: Long, bony fingers are fairly dexterous, be it with a scalpel or his knitting needles.
Weaknesses: A bit sickly and physically weak compared to his compatriots. Barely passes the bar for the basic physical training level the army expects of it's field operatives.
Magical
Specializations:
-Tier 1: Spoken - Illusions (Emotional Constructs), Prof. 3
-Tier 2: Mental – Telepathy, Prof. 3
-Tier 3: Physical - Telepathy ( Memory excision) Prof 3.
Visual Display: When using illusions, Strakh's irises shift to a crimson red. When he begins use of his emotional constructs, his skin becomes paler, closer to a snow white. Illusions tend to have a smoky, grey edge to them unless he's thinking particularly hard about them. When preparing his memory excision, his hands begin turning black entirely.
Special Abilities:
Tiers: Empathy, Psychometry, Hypnosis, Insight(primarily taste, but applies to any emotional information),
Human: En.Taste, Alternate Sense (tasting emotion)
Strengths: His ability to create illusions, which can further be strengthened and solidified by forming an emotional link with someone nearby. An illusion of fire, for example, is going to be able to burn if connected to someone with a fear of fire. The stronger the emotion in the target, the more 'real' the temporary illusory construct becomes. With his insight focused on his empathic abilities, Strakh is usually able to find the most powerful emotion around to fuel his needs.
Strakh is also an accomplished telepath, able to read surface thoughts, intentions, as well as dive deeper and delve through memories and other thoughts. He can combine implanting thoughts with his gift at hypnosis in order to plant powerful 'suggestions', though in order to affect the target they usually need to be distracted or weakened, or just plain weaker minded than him.
After a lengthy preparation, Strakh can physically drag memories out of a person's mind. This allows him to store someone's thoughts and specific memories in physical containers for use at a later time. During the process, he can also destroy the memory, leaving a blank in the victim's mind. Once removed or copied, a memory can be absorbed by anyone else to gain the experiences and thoughts of the owner at the time of the memory. This ability has been used to cure traumas, accelerate training of recruits and ruin the minds of caught spies or double agents, occasionally turning them to the side of the Ruthenian cause.
In addition to his telepathy, Strakh is an empath, which allows him to feel exactly how effective he is on a victim's psyche. Combined with his unnatural Insight when it comes to emotions, and the ability to taste every nuance of feeling and emotion in the air, and his victims usually don't have many secrets from him even when they're strong enough to resist his telepathic probing.
Weaknesses: Much of his power relies on his 'prey' being susceptible to psychological attacks. If confronted by a pure hearted, near fearless idiot, his constructs lose a lot of potency, and illusions, while useful without his constructs, can't hurt anyone. As such, combat is never his preferred method of conflict resolution. Memory excision requires constant contact with the victim's body, and can only be performed when Strakh's hands are completely blackened, a process which takes about ten minutes of focusing and constant upkeep.
Inventory
Mundane: A small library full of books in his quarters. Mostly old, dusty books on fairy tales and cautionary stories, before they began to be written in a way that wouldn't make children cry. Scalpel. Knitting needles.
Magical:
Roll of Holding Tape: A two inch tall roll of tape sectioned off into squares of two inches by two inches. Each square can contain an object of up to 1lb, no matter the volume, in the form of a sticker.
Infrared Lantern: A glowing red ball that can be activated to float alongside it's user, during which time it grants them infrared vision. The ball also serves as a separate eye and can be mentally controlled, although it can only stray up to thirty feet away before it 'disconnects' and falls to the ground.
Feathery Chainmail: A chainmail he tends to wear underneath his clothing, it has a large feather symbol on the back. The wearer and all things he carries are reduced to just under one tenth of their mass. This allows the user to jump higher, appear faster, and take less damage from falling down or being thrown against something (although it's easier to perform the latter).
History
Alexander and Minerva Konstantin. Childhood sweethearts who moved out of their parents homes together the moment they could to open up a curio store in Rynok, in a neighbourhood they'd learn later was rather involved with the seedy underbelly of the city and certainly nowhere to raise a family. Alexander had always had a quick temper, but it was only once he started going to the local brewery that the pair realized that not only was he more than a little addicted to the bottle, but that it brought out the worst in him.
Once his wife was pregnant with his son, Alexander did his best to bottle up the constant rage and anger that was becoming his trademark, and even stopped drinking entirely. At least, until Strakh was born. It took about a day for them to realize that the young boy cried each and every time his father was near.
Before long Alexander found himself in the taverns again, looking for any excuse to stay out of the house so his wife could get at least a bit of rest from their baby's cries. Of course, outside observers would quickly realize that there just wasn't any sense in him going out for his wife's convenience if he beat her when he came back.
But he was mostly blackout drunk by that point, and Minerva never saw fit to tell him anything other than how she was so clumsy she just kept hitting into doors and tables and falling down stairs. Alexander thought it was fishy, sure, but the truth wasn't something his conscious mind was willing to accept.
And then , a few years later, there was one hit too many. One strike too hard, and the shopkeeper found himself waking up to a crying seven year old mourning his mother.
Thanks to a few of his less savory associates, Alexander was at least able to make the body disappear without too much fuss or having to alert the authorities. Even if he felt crushed that he’d killed the woman he loved, the least he could do was to take care of their child. And going to prison wouldn’t be a very good way of doing that. Instead, he just had the young man promise never to mention this to anyone... never even to bring Minerva up in conversation, and he did his best to carry on, ignoring the guilt he felt. It was a bit disturbing how easy it was to lock away those feelings, but he had more than enough to keep himself distracted.
And when he didn’t, there was always the bottle.
At least he had an energetic, active and physical young man to raise, a rough and tumble mirror of himself at that age... at least, that’s what Alexander dreamed of. Instead he was saddled with a soft spoken, pasty skinned bookworm who would just as soon sit in a dark corner and read a musty old tome than do anything social with his father or making any friends.
Seeing that his efforts to connect with his son were about as successful as a leming’s attempts to fly, Alexander gave up after a few months, spending his nights going back to the tavern instead. If the kid wanted to raise himself on books and atlases, so be it. But it was rather insulting to a father to be brushed aside by his seven year old son, and though he never mentioned it, Alexander’s anger was fully realized when he came home barely able to walk and with his common sense taking a back seat to the taste of whisky.
Only once did Strakh get caught by his father in one of those moods, and he paid for it with a broken arm and several ugly bruises all over his body. Even if he woke up in his father’s arms, the man promising it would never happen again, that was it. Any trust the young man had towards his father had flown away entirely. Now Strakh spent his evenings hiding under his bed, reading books in the claustrophobic space and tensing up every night whenever his father came close, drunk or not.
Except for meals, the young man managed to pretty much always stay out of Alexander’s way. Eventually the man stopped trying, accepting that he’d never get close to his son, and endeavoring to at least feed the child as he became more and more interested in thick tomes of history.
Around puberty Strakh began to be able to taste various things in the air around others, and it didn’t take long for him to realize it corresponded to another’s emotions. It actually had him go out of the house more often, just wandering the streets in the evenings, tasting new and interesting things, and quickly realizing that he was able to discern a scary amount of information from it..
The days slipped into a kind of monotonous routine. Strakh would wake up, eat breakfast and avoid conversation, read books in his room, do the same at lunch, repeat again at supper, and when his father went out to drink, he’d then go home and hide under his bed so his drunken father wouldn’t be able to reach him when he returned.
The day his life changed was the same as ever, with the only difference that his father wasn’t angry when he came home. Drunk, but not angry. Sad, in fact. Well, okay, a little angry, the bitter taste was still in the air, but it was dampened by another, much stronger one. The young boy crawled out from under his bed and towards the living room, seeing his father kneeling in front of the fireplace, holding something against his chest and... crying?
"I'm sorry I hurt you, if it wasn't for that child you'd still be with me."
"Father? Who are you talking to?"
"S-strakh!? No one! go back to bed!"
"What’s that picture... M...Mom? You're talking to M... “
The taste in the air got even stronger, guilt washing out the anger and mingling perfectly with the sadness.
“You killed her?!"
The shock of the realization had him blurt it out, which only served to bring back all of the guilt to the forefront of Alexander's mind. But this time he realized that his son knew, and in his inebriated state, he only thought that the boy needed to keep his mouth shut. For good.
Screaming in panic as his father closed in with anger and hate written all over his face, Strakh closed his eyes and wished for someone to help him, anyone. His thoughts naturally went to his mother, and just when he knew those thick meaty fingers would close around his throat... Nothing. In self defence, it looked like Strakh had managed to tap into powers he didn’t know he had. An illusion of his mother, his illusionary abilities manifesting for the first time and latching on to the guilt of his father, becoming solid enough to strangle him to death.
After a few hours of just simply staring at the body, Strakh called the police in himself, still in shock. They found him sitting in front of his father’s corpse, looking at it with a sort of curiosity. Next day, he was already a ward of the state, to be trained by government agents to better his abilities for the sake of the country, as well as learning more about himself during the following years in service. More than ten years constantly refining himself and his abilities, his illusions, later learning telepathy and climbing the ranks as an "information specialist", made the young man become an ambitious soldier. His drive to be better than everyone, to be more useful than others of his position helped the eventual birth of his ability to excise and remove memories and prepare them for storing after some years.
His position also constantly reminded him of that night, because as scared as he was, he remembered everything that happened vividly. And what he remembered most is how, once his father’s eyes had gone wide, and while ghostly fingers closed around his throat, the bitter taste of anger and sadness was overpowered.
By the most delectable thing he’s ever tasted since.
A nice healthy dose of sheer terror.
Contact: PM this account or Vladislav’s
Intentions: Villain.
Background
Name: Strakh Konstantin
Race: Human
Age: 46
Tier: 3
Social
Place of Birth: Rynok
Allegiances: Himself first, and then whomsoever's winning the war
Aspirations:
Nicknames: Twiggs. Fearmonger. “GGAHHHHHH”
Titles: Information Specialist.
Relatives: Alexander Konstantin (father, deceased). Minerva Konstantin (Mother, deceased)
Significant Other: None.
Mental
Personality: Takes utter delight in another person's fear. He tends to be quiet, reserved, and soft spoken, and when he does speak it's often to prod or poke fun at others.
Likes: Terrifying others, 'cooking' the best 'tasting' fear. Sitting in the dark. Books. Soft acoustic music.
Dislikes: Loud noises. Bright lights.
Strengths: A keen observer and profiler even without his magical abilities. Eidetic memory.
Weaknesses: Has a tendency to get under the skin of those he works with, not very good at making friends.
Physical
Major Details: Gaunt. Pasty, Pale skin. 6'5'' . Waist length black hair. Irises have a yellow hue.
Appearance: Strakh has filed his teeth to sharp points because it makes his appearance even more unsettling. His hair is usually kept up in a bun, or a simply left dishevelled if he thinks it'll help make someone uncomfortable during an interrogation. Very thin, very little muscle on his body. Tends to wear dress slacks and a black dress shirt. A black tie, if he's working. If it's an interrogation, he might go for a more tattered look, and for outer wear he has a thick cape and hood.
Natural Abilities: Natural human abilities
Strengths: Long, bony fingers are fairly dexterous, be it with a scalpel or his knitting needles.
Weaknesses: A bit sickly and physically weak compared to his compatriots. Barely passes the bar for the basic physical training level the army expects of it's field operatives.
Magical
Specializations:
-Tier 1: Spoken - Illusions (Emotional Constructs), Prof. 3
-Tier 2: Mental – Telepathy, Prof. 3
-Tier 3: Physical - Telepathy ( Memory excision) Prof 3.
Visual Display: When using illusions, Strakh's irises shift to a crimson red. When he begins use of his emotional constructs, his skin becomes paler, closer to a snow white. Illusions tend to have a smoky, grey edge to them unless he's thinking particularly hard about them. When preparing his memory excision, his hands begin turning black entirely.
Special Abilities:
Tiers: Empathy, Psychometry, Hypnosis, Insight(primarily taste, but applies to any emotional information),
Human: En.Taste, Alternate Sense (tasting emotion)
Strengths: His ability to create illusions, which can further be strengthened and solidified by forming an emotional link with someone nearby. An illusion of fire, for example, is going to be able to burn if connected to someone with a fear of fire. The stronger the emotion in the target, the more 'real' the temporary illusory construct becomes. With his insight focused on his empathic abilities, Strakh is usually able to find the most powerful emotion around to fuel his needs.
Strakh is also an accomplished telepath, able to read surface thoughts, intentions, as well as dive deeper and delve through memories and other thoughts. He can combine implanting thoughts with his gift at hypnosis in order to plant powerful 'suggestions', though in order to affect the target they usually need to be distracted or weakened, or just plain weaker minded than him.
After a lengthy preparation, Strakh can physically drag memories out of a person's mind. This allows him to store someone's thoughts and specific memories in physical containers for use at a later time. During the process, he can also destroy the memory, leaving a blank in the victim's mind. Once removed or copied, a memory can be absorbed by anyone else to gain the experiences and thoughts of the owner at the time of the memory. This ability has been used to cure traumas, accelerate training of recruits and ruin the minds of caught spies or double agents, occasionally turning them to the side of the Ruthenian cause.
In addition to his telepathy, Strakh is an empath, which allows him to feel exactly how effective he is on a victim's psyche. Combined with his unnatural Insight when it comes to emotions, and the ability to taste every nuance of feeling and emotion in the air, and his victims usually don't have many secrets from him even when they're strong enough to resist his telepathic probing.
Weaknesses: Much of his power relies on his 'prey' being susceptible to psychological attacks. If confronted by a pure hearted, near fearless idiot, his constructs lose a lot of potency, and illusions, while useful without his constructs, can't hurt anyone. As such, combat is never his preferred method of conflict resolution. Memory excision requires constant contact with the victim's body, and can only be performed when Strakh's hands are completely blackened, a process which takes about ten minutes of focusing and constant upkeep.
Inventory
Mundane: A small library full of books in his quarters. Mostly old, dusty books on fairy tales and cautionary stories, before they began to be written in a way that wouldn't make children cry. Scalpel. Knitting needles.
Magical:
Roll of Holding Tape: A two inch tall roll of tape sectioned off into squares of two inches by two inches. Each square can contain an object of up to 1lb, no matter the volume, in the form of a sticker.
Infrared Lantern: A glowing red ball that can be activated to float alongside it's user, during which time it grants them infrared vision. The ball also serves as a separate eye and can be mentally controlled, although it can only stray up to thirty feet away before it 'disconnects' and falls to the ground.
Feathery Chainmail: A chainmail he tends to wear underneath his clothing, it has a large feather symbol on the back. The wearer and all things he carries are reduced to just under one tenth of their mass. This allows the user to jump higher, appear faster, and take less damage from falling down or being thrown against something (although it's easier to perform the latter).
History
Alexander and Minerva Konstantin. Childhood sweethearts who moved out of their parents homes together the moment they could to open up a curio store in Rynok, in a neighbourhood they'd learn later was rather involved with the seedy underbelly of the city and certainly nowhere to raise a family. Alexander had always had a quick temper, but it was only once he started going to the local brewery that the pair realized that not only was he more than a little addicted to the bottle, but that it brought out the worst in him.
Once his wife was pregnant with his son, Alexander did his best to bottle up the constant rage and anger that was becoming his trademark, and even stopped drinking entirely. At least, until Strakh was born. It took about a day for them to realize that the young boy cried each and every time his father was near.
Before long Alexander found himself in the taverns again, looking for any excuse to stay out of the house so his wife could get at least a bit of rest from their baby's cries. Of course, outside observers would quickly realize that there just wasn't any sense in him going out for his wife's convenience if he beat her when he came back.
But he was mostly blackout drunk by that point, and Minerva never saw fit to tell him anything other than how she was so clumsy she just kept hitting into doors and tables and falling down stairs. Alexander thought it was fishy, sure, but the truth wasn't something his conscious mind was willing to accept.
And then , a few years later, there was one hit too many. One strike too hard, and the shopkeeper found himself waking up to a crying seven year old mourning his mother.
Thanks to a few of his less savory associates, Alexander was at least able to make the body disappear without too much fuss or having to alert the authorities. Even if he felt crushed that he’d killed the woman he loved, the least he could do was to take care of their child. And going to prison wouldn’t be a very good way of doing that. Instead, he just had the young man promise never to mention this to anyone... never even to bring Minerva up in conversation, and he did his best to carry on, ignoring the guilt he felt. It was a bit disturbing how easy it was to lock away those feelings, but he had more than enough to keep himself distracted.
And when he didn’t, there was always the bottle.
At least he had an energetic, active and physical young man to raise, a rough and tumble mirror of himself at that age... at least, that’s what Alexander dreamed of. Instead he was saddled with a soft spoken, pasty skinned bookworm who would just as soon sit in a dark corner and read a musty old tome than do anything social with his father or making any friends.
Seeing that his efforts to connect with his son were about as successful as a leming’s attempts to fly, Alexander gave up after a few months, spending his nights going back to the tavern instead. If the kid wanted to raise himself on books and atlases, so be it. But it was rather insulting to a father to be brushed aside by his seven year old son, and though he never mentioned it, Alexander’s anger was fully realized when he came home barely able to walk and with his common sense taking a back seat to the taste of whisky.
Only once did Strakh get caught by his father in one of those moods, and he paid for it with a broken arm and several ugly bruises all over his body. Even if he woke up in his father’s arms, the man promising it would never happen again, that was it. Any trust the young man had towards his father had flown away entirely. Now Strakh spent his evenings hiding under his bed, reading books in the claustrophobic space and tensing up every night whenever his father came close, drunk or not.
Except for meals, the young man managed to pretty much always stay out of Alexander’s way. Eventually the man stopped trying, accepting that he’d never get close to his son, and endeavoring to at least feed the child as he became more and more interested in thick tomes of history.
Around puberty Strakh began to be able to taste various things in the air around others, and it didn’t take long for him to realize it corresponded to another’s emotions. It actually had him go out of the house more often, just wandering the streets in the evenings, tasting new and interesting things, and quickly realizing that he was able to discern a scary amount of information from it..
The days slipped into a kind of monotonous routine. Strakh would wake up, eat breakfast and avoid conversation, read books in his room, do the same at lunch, repeat again at supper, and when his father went out to drink, he’d then go home and hide under his bed so his drunken father wouldn’t be able to reach him when he returned.
The day his life changed was the same as ever, with the only difference that his father wasn’t angry when he came home. Drunk, but not angry. Sad, in fact. Well, okay, a little angry, the bitter taste was still in the air, but it was dampened by another, much stronger one. The young boy crawled out from under his bed and towards the living room, seeing his father kneeling in front of the fireplace, holding something against his chest and... crying?
"I'm sorry I hurt you, if it wasn't for that child you'd still be with me."
"Father? Who are you talking to?"
"S-strakh!? No one! go back to bed!"
"What’s that picture... M...Mom? You're talking to M... “
The taste in the air got even stronger, guilt washing out the anger and mingling perfectly with the sadness.
“You killed her?!"
The shock of the realization had him blurt it out, which only served to bring back all of the guilt to the forefront of Alexander's mind. But this time he realized that his son knew, and in his inebriated state, he only thought that the boy needed to keep his mouth shut. For good.
Screaming in panic as his father closed in with anger and hate written all over his face, Strakh closed his eyes and wished for someone to help him, anyone. His thoughts naturally went to his mother, and just when he knew those thick meaty fingers would close around his throat... Nothing. In self defence, it looked like Strakh had managed to tap into powers he didn’t know he had. An illusion of his mother, his illusionary abilities manifesting for the first time and latching on to the guilt of his father, becoming solid enough to strangle him to death.
After a few hours of just simply staring at the body, Strakh called the police in himself, still in shock. They found him sitting in front of his father’s corpse, looking at it with a sort of curiosity. Next day, he was already a ward of the state, to be trained by government agents to better his abilities for the sake of the country, as well as learning more about himself during the following years in service. More than ten years constantly refining himself and his abilities, his illusions, later learning telepathy and climbing the ranks as an "information specialist", made the young man become an ambitious soldier. His drive to be better than everyone, to be more useful than others of his position helped the eventual birth of his ability to excise and remove memories and prepare them for storing after some years.
His position also constantly reminded him of that night, because as scared as he was, he remembered everything that happened vividly. And what he remembered most is how, once his father’s eyes had gone wide, and while ghostly fingers closed around his throat, the bitter taste of anger and sadness was overpowered.
By the most delectable thing he’s ever tasted since.
A nice healthy dose of sheer terror.
Appearance
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