Ivan Braginsky - Russian Federation

Name – Ivan Nikolayevich Braginsky
Country of Origin – Russian Federation
Age – 28
Birthday – December 30th
Job – Blunt Weapons Expert

Personality

Ivan, for how creepy he tends to come across as, is really shy. He doesn't like letting people know him well because he feels that makes him vulnerable. He'd gotten used to keeping things on the inside to minimize the impact of what his childhood captor did to him. He hates how lonely this makes him though so he periodically will attempt to be friendly towards others, which tends to come across in some socially inappropriate way since he has very little idea of what is the "proper" way to interact with others.

Because of his near perpetual loneliness, once he likes you... you will be hard-pressed to get rid of him. Ivan will follow you around, protect you, call you at weird hours of the night "just to see what's going on", knock on your door at said weird hours, pick you up off the ground for hugs, cook for you (don't eat the borscht), and come up with some bizarre pet name for you. The worst case scenario is when he hits you, gently or otherwise because it is impossible to tell if he likes you or hates you. It would seem he gets really attached. Also, he will show up at your place of employment and just... stare at you.

Another side effect of this loneliness is that he wants a pet. Sadly, Ivan doesn't just want any pet. He wants a yak. Yes, a yak. He periodically fantasizes about owning one... out loud... in public. He doesn't have room for a yak, but he wants one and has even bought a lot of the equipment he would need for one. Ivan also enjoys bringing it up to his superior that he'd love to have more land so that he could have the potential yak he has dubbed "Babushka" or "Grandmother".

Ivan also enjoys sitting down periodically to knit. The creations are never anything extravagant, just pairs of socks and scarves. Rumor has it that anything he knits is very warm... at the cost of feeling like it was made from pubic hair (I.E. they feel really itchy). He says he knits just to keep his hands busy and that what he makes can withstand Siberian winters.

He also doesn't talk very often. When he does, it tends to be some sort of... creepy statement. He talks much more though once he's had something (A.K.A. several somethings) to drink. Whether or not you should take anything he says seriously is a personal choice. It can be hard to tell when he actually has a point and is saying something serious or if he just being moderately daft. Even whether he is actually insane or not is really up for debate.

Luckily, insanity debate aside, he is generally pretty harmless ("love patting" aside)... unless you anger him, threaten someone close to him (including any sunflower in existence, the special scarf his sister gave him, and the idea of his yak), or touch his vodka (which he likes far more than is healthy). If you do any of those three things, you will be in for a severe thrashing. He isn't above using violence to deal with problems, especially when he has some blunt object at his disposal to beat someone into submission with. By the way, he favours metal pipes to hit someone with.

Lastly, there are only two people that it is known he loves unconditionally. These people would be his sisters that he hasn't seen since he was five years old: his older sister, INSERTUKRAINE, and his younger sister, INSERTBELARUS. INSERTUKRAINE gave him the scarf that he is never seen without and he deems it to be his most precious possession, even if he can hardly remember the young girl who gave it to him.

For some reason though, he actually likes scones and various kinds of tea. Never tell him his English is bad, at least not bluntly, or otherwise ridicule him for it. Offering suggestions for improvement of his English however, he will gladly accept... Prepare to be hugged by a bear, if you do.

Reason for Recruitment

The dark secret is probably one many people share. Everyone, at their core, blames themselves for something, whatever it is. This is Ivan's inner-fault, at the least the one he knows of. He never admits what it is precisely that he blames himself for, but the instability this self-loathing brought got him landed in a mental institute outside of a small town straddling one of the great railways in the frozen wastes of Siberia. That's where PEC operatives found him. They didn't ask him what he did, but he more than happily went with him. It meant he'd be let out of that blasted straight-jacket. It meant he could redeem himself. They didn't even have to threaten him. Whether he was actually mad or not is still up for debate.

In truth, he didn't do anything except save himself. After being brutally beaten and abused from the time he was five years old until the time he escaped his captor at age twenty. Some might exempt him from any moral debt for killing the old Mongolian man who'd stolen him from his family, beaten him, starved him and otherwise done unsavoury things to the poor boy he'd deemed his slave. He'd killed the man in his sleep with the very object that had been used against him over the years -- a metal pipe.

It's on record in that asylum that Ivan had been found "babbling madly" (He claims he had tried to explain where he'd come from and what had happened to him). After being incarcerated, he fell silent about it and why he was there was never spoken of again.

Appearance

Most notably, Ivan is rather... tall and bulky. At around six feet and six inches tall, weighing some two hundred and sixty pounds which is a best guess since he refuses to step on a scale), it is obvious why some consider him the human equivalent of a bear (Let's not talk about the fur coat underneath the clothes that also adds to this bestial stigma). Make no mistake that most of that weight is muscle-mass, but if you were to squeeze his middle, there would be a bit of squishy give that comes with a bit of fat.

Also, which had been unusual for Slavs at one point in time, he has beige blond hair as opposed to the typical dark brown or black colours his people were known for in the past. The funny thing is that his eyebrows are more in the expected tones, a rather dull brown. This leads to suspicions that he bleaches his hair, which he can neither confirm nor deny. His eyes are also a slight purple, but could appear blue or grey depending on the light.

Clothing-wise though, he's the run-of-the-mill creepy guy with long, dark coats. Underneath the long leather (sometimes canvas) coats, he tends to wear dark coloured turtle-neck sweaters over black or grey slacks. He also favours steel-toe work boots (along with brown or black leather gloves) but has been seen wearing loafers or running shoes on occasion. The one thing he'd never be seen without is the ludicrously long (the tails reach the back of his knees after being wrapped around his neck three times), off-white scarf he wears with everything. He tends to put the coats on over it to keep the tails from getting in the way while working, but otherwise he doesn't bother. In his younger days though, he frequently tripped over the damn thing.

History

Ivan Nikolayevich Braginsky was born into a poor, working family in Vladivostok (the thriving port city on the eastern shores of the Russian Federation). His father, Nikolae, worked as a fisherman for a small vessel based in the city's port and was absent from the family for long stretches of time. When he was home, however, he was prone to drinking and isolating himself in the corner of the shack that had the television. His mother, however, whose name Ivan could not remember since he was only a toddler at the time, died giving birth to his younger sister, INSERTBELARUS and leaving his older sister (still a child herself), INSERTUKRAINE, to take care of the house when their father was either away or hammered.

One day in the middle of winter, when Ivan was five years old, INSERTUKRAINE sent her younger brother out into the city to go on an errand to pick up some fish from the market. She gave him a few coins and a ludicrously long, handmade scarf to help keep him warm on his trip. Sadly though, he never made it back home. Ivan made it to the market and bought the fish, but on the way back home, he tripped on the tails of the scarf and bumped into a darker-skinned man with somewhat slanted eyes. Before he could apologize for getting in the man's way, the man snapped Ivan up in his arms and drug him away.

The man was a Mongolian whose real name Ivan never knew. Instead he'd been instructed to address the man as "Papa."Papa, when asked why he had a young Slavic boy with him, would just say that this was his adopted son, Ivan (He'd asked Ivan what his name was and figured that the name was common enough to use without risk of being caught). The first thing that happened when Papa snatched Ivan from the market was that he put them on a train north to one of the boom-towns on the railway. This was where Ivan spent the next fifteen years.

In public, he and Papa seemed to have a loving, father-son relationship. Ivan would look up to him and follow his commands and Papa would dote on him with food and presents. If only this was the truth back at home. Papa would strip all of the nice things away from him and say that those were only for going outside. Ivan was, in reality, kept as a multi-purpose slave for Papa. He was frequently starved (the food he received out in town was generally all he would have to eat for long periods of time), beaten, and otherwise tormented in ways he will not speak of to this day.

As time went on, no one really noticed that Ivan was never in school, never seen without Papa, never with other children, etc. Papa had come up with excessively believable excuses for every potential question as he encountered them. One favourite was "Ivan is being home-schooled." Another was "Ivan has poor sense of direction and would get lost if I sent him out on his own." It went on like this with such ease, especially since many people who did suspect things just looked the other way. One of the most common myths perpetuated by the aging Mongolian was that Ivan was retarded, so no one thought anything of it when the scrawny little boy grew up into a lanky young man and still lived with his guardian.

One night, when Ivan was twenty years old, Papa was particularly hammered, the effects of which were especially brutal for Ivan. When Papa fell asleep later that night, the battered and bruised Ivan lied where he'd fallen on the floor from the attack. Gears and springs spun and clicked in his reeling mind until something snapped with what felt (to him) like a shot. He realized just how much he hated his "Papa."

He grabbed a pipe that had been laying near Papa's bed. It had been used in the earlier bout of abuse and still had a few flecks of blood on it. It would have been the perfect revenge. There wasn't even a chance to scream as Papa's blood joined his own on the metal surface, along with bits of blood and other gore.

Sparing the details of the scene, Ivan dropped the pipe and ran outside into the thickly falling snow. He couldn't stay there anymore. No one really questioned when he took the train farther north (using some money he took off of Papa's corpse) to another, slightly larger town. He didn't really care much where he was going, so long as it was away from the place he'd come from. Ivan had intended to take the train as far north as it would go, but there were mechanical difficulties and the train had to stop there.

Unfortunately though, he had no money and was forced to beg to get by. When trying to explain to those kind of enough to stop and help what had happened to him, they just thought he was a deranged transient and gave him a few coins. One person however started arguing with him about it, calling him a "lying, lazy bum who should just go get a fucking job." The altercation ended with the person missing several teeth, a smashed nose, and knee bending the wrong way. Ivan was arrested for assault, soon found unfit to stand trial due to insanity (because the jail was full and they needed to put him somewhere else), and locked away in the town's mental asylum. Since he had no documents of his existence, they took his first name, asked him what his father's name was and pulled a surname out of a hat for him since his original one had been lost to memory.

For over five years, Ivan stayed there in a small room with lots of locks, no window, and an old mattress with a blanket to which he was strapped every night. He was also classified as severely dangerous so he was made to wear a straight-jacket whenever not in his room. If he wasn't half-mad before, he had at least lost a good portion of his mental stability by the time the PEC representatives showed up. He was also very thin and seemed half-starved.

Over the past three years, since they'd brought him far south to the remote Chinese county (and fattened him up significantly with plenty of food), he'd studied and trained with the assassins, specifically to deal with various types of blunt weapons. Even when given the option of many sophisticated bludgeons, he constantly chose the lead pipe as his favourite.

Now, Ivan inspects the blunt instruments, catalogues them, and helps show other residents how to use them. Even after three years of study though, he is has pathetic English skills.

RP Sample –

The sunlamp clicked off in the corner of Ivan's spare room. The flower was ready for harvest. He liked sunflowers as a general rule, but this particular one he had grown for a purpose. For the past several months, he'd had his eye on that gentle Lithuanian librarian, Toris. Despite all of his awkward shyness, he'd been kind of sort of following the poor guy. This flower was going to be his present to Toris... perhaps to make his intentions perfectly clear to the younger man.

Ivan clipped the flower near the base with care and quickly wrapped it up like a bouquet, even if it was just a singular flower. It was large enough to be its own bouquet. He tied a bright yellow ribbon around the wrapping to secure it. Petting the soft petals, the tall man hugged the plant to himself and prayed that Toris would like sunflowers.

Out of Character:
Name – Ivan Robertovich Volkov (That's the name I answer to. After being called Ivan for so long for a myriad of reasons, it just became my name)
Age – 19
Time Zone – PST, GMT -8
Contact Info – (Optional) If you want it, just ask

Also, it's my fault that we have vodkascones. I am the vodka in those scones.

Lastly, wherever Ukraine and Belarus are mentioned, I will fill in when/if someone apps for those characters. If, however, the players either do not want to be related or would like some changes to the history, that is perfectly fine too! :3

Also, towards the end, the history started falling apart and feeling awkward so if it's wonky, I can go back later and fix it.