Ivan Braginsky - Russian Federation

:advanced:

Personality:

The most obvious thing about this man is that he is very quiet and that he is always smiling at you. It is not known whether this is a conscious behavior or whether he merely has a lack for showing the average range of emotions. These smiles can range from child-like innocence and wonder to a level of creepy grins found almost exclusively in horror films. The only way to really gauge how he is feeling is to carefully pick apart his word choice (which is difficult, almost impossible) or to push him into an extreme emotional state where his calm smiles will not hold back the feelings, such as a violent rage or a near suicidal depression. It is unknown to most how any extreme state can be induced as most people don't know him well enough to know what bothers him deep down. Part of the secret is that he is actually very shy and poorly socialized.

He also tends to react to most situations in a very subdued manner. Someone dies in front of him? He won't really care that much. If anything, he'll chuckle and go about his business with that ever present smile on his face. This has caused people to wonder somewhat if he is all there in the head.

Ivan has no problem dealing with problems in a violent manner. This is very different from the "violent rage" mentioned earlier. If one of his bots or even organic lackeys disobeys, it isn't beyond him to beat them into submission or to death. Again, he will smile the entire time. His little episodes of violence are not well-documented but are whispered in the ears of human and cyborg employees, even reaching some of his colleagues. Many bots owned by him are even programmed to not notice displays of violence and actually deny any mention of it, instead preferring to say, "Mr. Braginsky is a kind man who treats his servants fairly." What a lovely lie, isn't it?

Behind the serenity, Ivan is actually a mentally fractured, if not shattered, man. The combination of an abusive, sometimes neglectful childhood and traumatic stress during the skirmishes with Georgia has done a powerful number on his sanity. When by himself, he commonly gets lost in thoughts and flashbacks, staring off into space for hours until something gets his attention or he otherwise snaps out of it. In an attempt to ward off the dissociative symptoms, he frequently tries to find company of some sort... which is difficult considering he is horrible at making friends. Sometimes, in order to deal with it, he drinks... heavily. While his Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is not common knowledge or even diagnosed, his drinking is well known.

His scarf has special importance in also soothing the symptoms of PTSD. He frequently kept the scarf with him before joining the military as it was a present from his older sister, but after being discharged honorably from military service, he keeps it with him constantly. He only takes it off to sleep or deal with any manner of hygiene needs. Even then, he keeps it within arm's reach so that if he needs it, it's there for him. He finds the touch of the fabric and "the love it was made with" calming.

After having studied robotics in the military, he used his knowledge to help ease his loneliness. While he does have sisters, he never really felt as connected with them as he would have liked. This weird combination of perpetual "feeling alone in a crowd" was what lead to the rise of the first "service bots" by the D.E.R.P. which Ivan formed after making the first few. He invented the various conversions and keeps them closely guarded secrets except from other bots he employs for the purpose of making conversions and upgrades. Nowadays, he rarely actually performs conversions himself, but once in awhile he will...

Also, after the skirmishes, Ivan began to loathe all things cold, specifically winter. He has been heard mentioning how he wished to have access to a vast field of sunflowers since they seem to banish the feeling of cold, or so he says. He also has the odd quirk of periodically sitting down and knitting socks for no apparent reason. He says it is to keep his hands busy. Generally, he likes to knit while watching hockey games on the television. The violence is his favorite part~ Furthermore, he keeps around some old Soviet memorabilia because he finds himself fascinated by the history of the objects and the region they came from. It was part of connecting with his family's background, or so he claims... he will never admit to being a closet Marxist despite making his living as a "capitalist pig."

Currently, he runs a company that is responsible for a moderately high-priced, high-quality brand of vodka known as "Bodark." He isn't excessively active in it, but he does his best to make sure things are working smoothly. He mostly employs specially programmed bots to cut the cost of operation.

History:

Born into an affluent family that supported itself in high-style with the production of a popular brand of vodka, you'd think Ivan Braginsky would have had an easy life. This was most certainly not the case. He was the second child and the first son born to Nikolai Vasilyevich Braginsky and his wife Maria Grigorovna Braginskaya. While a rich family was a dream situation for most children, little Ivan had other worries. The family also clung strongly to their old Russian roots, to the point of making sure the first language their children knew was Russian... cursing them to have a funny and sexy accent.

His father drank heavily for several years. During many of his drinking binges, Ivan would be a nice little target for his rage, which started around the age of five. The other children in the school frequently commented on his bruises but no one told any of the adults. It "wasn't their place to do so" as so many parents taught their children at the time. After a month of this, his elder sister INSERTUKRAINE found him crying in his room. When asked what was the matter, he said he was sick of all of the kids talking about how he was always getting hurt since he said he was just clumsy. INSERTUKRAINE knew the true nature of the marks even though she never actually saw the violence occur. She gave him a scarf that she had made earlier in the year to wear to cover them up. It was obscenely long since she had just knitted until she ran out of yarn.

Sadly, even with being rather tall for five years old, Ivan had to pick up the tails of his scarf and carry them in his arms frequently to avoid getting them dirty. He frequently tripped on them while running or otherwise moving, therefore perpetuating the myth that he was just horribly clumsy. Natalia, his younger sister, had no idea of the reason behind him wearing the scarf, but she didn't seem too terribly bothered by it. It was the perfect way to get a laugh at someone else's expense. Their father, however, was less amused by the whole scarf thing and used to say something like, "My son should never be such a faggy ballerina." The children had no idea what that really meant, but it didn't matter at the time.

Even once Ivan became too large to hit, around the age of fifteen when he was the same height as his father and still growing, the old man expected so much of him that he never seemed to measure up to. His father called him stupid, so Ivan tried to excel in school... managing B's only because he was so stressed that he didn't have the energy to try harder. His father called him lazy, so he made sure to help the maids and cooks. For this, his father called him "a filthy blue-collar", so Ivan did his best to act proper and with the grace his mother and sisters seemed to drip. His father called him a "fag", so he joined the military upon graduation to prove he was as much of a man as his father if not more so.

His sisters never did anything wrong, and Ivan scraped just to get one iota of approval from his father. His mother wasn't much better. She was far too focused on spoiling his sisters and didn't have time for a son who "should be a big boy and take care of himself." Ivan never resented her... or his sisters... They didn't really do anything wrong, not in his eyes. He thought his mother did the best she could, even though in reality, it was the possible wrath of her husband she didn't want brought upon her.

The military took the poor young man to train in the robotics program immediately after he graduated high school at nineteen years old. Without the stress from his home to weigh him down, Ivan was able to excel and achieve equivalent certification to a university's Master's degree by the time he was twenty-four. Unfortunately, that was when the skirmishes between the Russian Federation and the Republic of Georgia started up and his unit was selected to be deployed as a United Nations peacekeeping force to minimize the damages. At least in the cold, they all learned how to knit their own socks... it was either that or they would probably freeze their feet off.

After an accidental explosion during a march, Ivan was taken to the field hospital with severe wounds. He'd been too close to the explosion. A piece of shrapnel had destroyed his left eye and another severely damaged his heart to the point where they had to replace them cybernetically and soon, or he would be dead on the table shortly. He was lucky, the doctor billed the military directly for the artificial heart, portions of which would come out of his "retirement", but never mentioned the eye. No one in his unit ever told him why the eye was off the record and Ivan gave up asking.

Sadly, though, they discharged him for his injuries. "An exposed heart was too much of a liability," they told him as they shipped him back home from the frozen wastes of Russia to the more frozen wastes of Antarctica. With his severance package in hand, a modest military retirement still coming in every month, he found upon arrival that his father had died of liver failure due to his alcoholism and his mother ran off to who-knows-where. He... still can't sort out how exactly to feel about that... He was relieved to hear that old bastard who was so cruel to him had bit the dust and even willed him ownership of their business since his sisters weren't "suited for the job of making a man's booze so you were my only option left." That irony still makes him chuckle periodically to this day.

Even with his financial future set, Ivan was still very lonely. His sisters had gone off and gotten lives of their own, leaving Ivan with no one. A sick idea formed in the back of his mind that eventually grew into a twisted reality... he wanted to make someone who would never be able to leave him. They didn't have to love him, but he refused to be alone. He experimented in his free time, furthering his knowledge of cybernetics and robotics (along with some medicine in order to aid the initial process of... his plan), all of the while compiling vast amounts of notes and potential schematics that he kept hidden in his pent-house suite.

Once his idea had matured and he felt that he had enough data to implement it, along with preparations for a proper place underground, Ivan began scouting for a target, now twenty-seven years old. He'd selected an abandoned military base that could only be reached through old maps and through underground tunnels from the city. No one used it, it was pretty much built and immediately abandoned since the leadership determined, after much red-tape, that they had a better location for a nearby base. The target, he'd figured, had to be someone no one would miss or at least be able to trace. He chose a small girl, about the age of seven probably the he found wandering the flower fields in the Underground Sector. She was holding a sunflower.

After he got her to the base, he put her under anesthesia and began his work. She was the first service bot ever made and he loved her... like she had been his own child and in a way she was. He'd stayed by her side for three days until her motherboard had a catastrophic failure resulting in her death. It shattered Ivan. For weeks, he went into a depression, only brought out by trying again and again to make a new android companion for himself. All of them were failures. With each one, he numbed himself to the pain of loss. By the time he was twenty-eight, and the first fully functional bot was created, he saw them as completely disposable pieces of property.

Property... As much as he hated the idea, considering he was partial to Marxist ideas (not that he could ever act upon them seeing as he had a capitalist corporation to manage, something he still kicked himself over), he learned quickly that people would want these bots... People would pay him vast amounts of money for these bots and desperate people would give up on life to become these bots for a chance at some cash. His initial distributors who actually knew who he was, eventually were... removed from the picture, and D.E.R.P. was created to be the "production" organization for these bots. Ivan had almost no human employees for this organization, just the ones who went out scouting for targets. He made a few bots specifically programmed with the knowledge to make the conversions. All Ivan had to do was sit behind a screen and look over the candidates in case anyone wanted to make a deal. This was how things went... for the next several years. At this time... the dissociation from reality began.

Ivan even slowly transferred the majority of his workforce in vodka production to specially programmed service bots. He kept a few humans to man the "store-front" so that his customers didn't get suspicious as to why he had so many damn bots when most rich people only had one or two. It was cheaper since none of them required actual pay... just periodic maintenance.

Now, here he was... his vast plan working magic for the rest of society and still leaving him a lonely man in his office, knitting while watching hockey and trying to not stare into space lest he lose himself in dark memories for hours. Luckily, in all of the bots produced except the ones he ordered to be scrapped for some malfunction or another, he hid a code... a very special code that if he needed it, could form the vast numbers of bots in the city to be an army at his beck and call. He prayed that he would never need to use that code.

RP Sample:

"Nyet, Kaufmann, your sister does look like a cow." Ivan pulled his coat tightly around his body, long scarf-tails blowing in the strong winds. It wasn't a storm, technically, but snow still whipped by them as they marched alongside a lumbering Russian tank heading towards the Georgian border. It royally sucked. Their unit had been called in to keep an eye on this tank to make sure it didn't do anything too terribly rash. The Antarctic unit was essentially a baby-sitter. Even in the almost murderous weather, youthful banter was one of the only ways to stay sane.

"C'mon, Braginsky, don't be such an ass!"

Ivan got teased periodically because he was the only one in the unit to actually speak Russian, so sometimes they used him to interpret between their commanding officer and the Russian soldiers they were marching with. There was one incident where Ivan made told one of his buddies that one of the other soldiers had called his sister a cow. It had been a joke and then smoothed over, but he still got flak for messing with his "buddies" like that. Oh well, it wasn't like there was anything else they actually had to do while out here in the freezing cold of winte-

The tall man suddenly found himself splayed on his back in the snow, unable to hear anything at a normal volume. Time seemed to slow down as well. The only thing he could register was that he couldn't really see... and that he was in a shit-ton of pain. He opened his mouth to scream in agony, but no sound came out that he could hear other than a muffled squeak. He heard voices calling out to him and saw the face of one of his unit buddies leaning over him. Someone else nearby was screaming, what sounded like one if they were screaming through thick glass at least, "Kaufmann!"

Ivan had been about to wonder where Kaufmann was when he realized that he could only see out of one eye. The other one wasn't opening... and something warm felt like it was oozing everywhere. His face felt like there was warm water dripping down it and his chest felt like there was a boiling lake centered around the worst part of the pain, where every pulse seemed to make the throb all the more potent. He tried to scream again, sound becoming clearer slowly as he was taking everything in.

"Braginsky! Hold on, you stupid bear!" The smoke rising from behind the man kneeling over him told him the entire story as it came into view. The tank... it ran over a mine... Ivan screamed again, the majority of his body feeling cold and beginning to go numb as the throbbing pain emanating from his core, which still felt like it was on fire, became more intense. They'd been close to the mine. He'd been hit... and by the sounds around him, Kaufmann had been too. He was dying... Ivan was dying. He was going to die out here in the snow without ever proving to his father that he was a man. At the pace time seemed to move at though, he had all of the time in the world.

As the weakness began to settle in, the pain dying down to an almost comfortable feeling of oblivion from all physical sensations, Ivan turned his head to the side. He stared out at the snow next to his body with the eye that still seemed to work. Blood was splattered across the virgin surface, marring it horribly. It was his blood, wasn't it? Of course it was. Bad Ivan, letting your blood make such a mess, he mentally chastised himself. He couldn't deny that the stark contrast, while initially sharp, was beginning to look beautifully comfortable to his eyes. He liked it.

"No! Braginsky! Stay awake! Stay with us, man!" Another man came close, this time trying to put pressure to the wounds with his icy, gloved hands. Sure, that would buy the dying Russian more time. Ivan smirked to himself, resigning himself to sleep as he finally too weak to do anything else. He closed his eye.

(( No, he doesn't actually die obviously, they managed to save him in time but if you just got shredded by shrapnel, you'd probably think you were dying too. ))

:ooc information:

Name: Ivan Robertovich Volkov
Age: 19
Time Zone (GMT +/-): GMT - 8.00
Experience:
+Russia for over a year
+Prussia for over a year *but very, very rarely*
+OC!North Korea for about six months
+America sporadically in one-on-one
Contact Information: I'd rather you would just ask.

The bodark is one of two types of Russian werewolf. For those who don't want to look it up, the bodark is the more dangerous variety supposedly, changing willingly using an incantation.

Lastly, goddamn Russian naming conventions... They make the names so long at times! XD

Also references to Belarus, Ukraine, and their parents can be altered to better fit the others when RPers for them show up.