INFO.

[m1895]

VASILIY YEGOROVICH ARDANKIN as the spaceship hurtles out toward the stars, the earth a star behind it, the earnest dog eyes fixed on black space like a door the masters have walked through and will return from, surely. Surely they'll come to get me. Surely they didn't love me all that time for this. BASICS NAME: Vasiliy Yegorovich Ardankin. The diminutive he's used all his life is Vasya, but he doesn't disclose this to nonspeakers because he doesn't trust them to use it correctly. CANON: Original Character. CANON POINT: 2019 - 3 years after he woke up in the modern world, 1 year after he immigrated to the US. AGE: 33. DATE OF BIRTH: 17 Jan 1910. GENDER: Male. SEXUALITY: Bisexual. Not fully closeted, but he doesn't freely offer that information and doesn't see it as identity - his perspective is more that it's somewhere between another detail about himself like hair color and an extracurricular activity like tennis. HEIGHT: 5'7 / 1,70m WEIGHT/BUILD: Around 130lbs/59kg, slim and toned. LANGUAGES: Russian (fluent — St. Petersburg dialect with 1930s patterns of inflection); English (functional proficiency with advanced medical vocabulary — strong accent, difficulties with grammar, poor handwriting) HISTORY I. ONE OF THESE DAYS THESE BOOTS ARE GONNA WALK ALL OVER YOU Vasiliy was born to a lower working class family in St. Petersburg—then known as Petrograd—in 1910, 6 years after Tsarevich Alexei, 7 years before John F. Kennedy. He grew up in crushing poverty with a near-constant state of food insecurity and no access to proper medical care, which nearly led to his mother's death when she miscarried due to malnutrition - one of his most traumatic early childhood memories, and one he associates deeply with the pre-revolution state of affairs. Although she tried, Nina would never again conceive due to permanent reproductive damage, which found Vasiliy - Vas'ka during these early years - in the highly atypical position of an only child in early 20th century Russia. He was four years when his father was drafted at the outbreak of the First World War; Yegor, like thousands of other Russians, returned from the battlefront a radical Bolshevik embittered by what he'd been forced to see and experience in the name of a distant king, planting the ideological seeds that would ultimately determine the trajectory of Vasiliy's life—and the nature of its end. Although he learned to read and perform basic math, Vasiliy received no formal education until the Party sent him to college at 27 years old; from the age of about six years he worked alongside his father, a welder. He was in Petrograd working in a factory when the 1917 women's march blossomed into multiple strikes, showing him the power of collective action at a very young age - as well as the brutality the monarchy was capable of. By the time that Tsar Nicholas II abdicated that year, over 1,000 people had been killed in Petrograd alone, and he'd watched the government that was allegedly there to protect him open fire on civilians in the street. He and his peers came up desensitized to violence to an extreme degree; by the age of seven, Vasiliy had stood in touching distance of a fresh corpse, witnessed multiple industrial accidents, and seen widespread gun violence. This was not unusual for his age cohort. When the Russian revolution took hold, both parents were followers of Lenin, then Stalinists—which would later be their saving grace during the purge—and raised Vasiliy in the image of what would eventually be dubbed the 'Soviet New Man': atheism, work ethic, stoicism, self-betterment, and willingness to sacrifice. The church had already left a sour taste in his mouth—during his time, Tsar Nicholas' rule was justified not by competence but by the institution of the church, which was perceived as inseparable from the monarchy—so Bolshevik ideals of secularism were hardly a big leap. Vasiliy started at the bottom of the party hierarchy as a local party clerk cataloguing enrollments and party cards at the age of eighteen, and by 1930, he was a member of Orgraspred, a deceptively powerful department responsible for staffing every position connected with the communist party. When Nikolai Yezhov, also an Orgraspred alum, was promoted to head of the NKVD, Vasiliy was part of the cohort that he took with him to fill the countless positions that had just been violently purged to clear away all of his predecessor's influence. II. THE CROWD YOU LIKE IS DANGEROUS, I HEARD THEY'RE JUST NO GOOD He started as a record-keeper in 1936; after about six months of this he was promoted to interrogations. He was initially tasked with playing the 'good cop' typical to the Soviet interrogation style because it was seen as a way to ease an outsider into the rougher work of interrogations involving physical force, but his charisma and perceptive nature made this a role that he excelled in, so there he stayed. Over the next four years Vasiliy successfully talked hundreds of fellow Soviets into signing false confessions against the backdrop of the Great Purge, a horrifically violent period of mass-murders in the hundreds of thousands — a daily task he rationalized by a) telling himself that he was sparing people who were doomed anyway from being tortured and b) silencing any apprehensions with immersion in the extremely cultlike environment of the NKVD as a whole. Without realizing it, Vasiliy became used to the mixed deference and fear civilians regarded him with. During the early Yezhovschina, the NKVD was revered and seen in a sort of extreme amplification of how soldiers were perceived in the US during the early to mid 2000s. Slowly, however, the tide turned, and when Yezhov's days as commissar became visibly numbered, so too did Vasiliy's—and those of every other staff member he had appointed. III. LIKE SATURN, THE REVOLUTION DEVOURS ITS CHILDREN On a chilly April night in 1940, the knock finally came. Vasiliy was arrested in his nightclothes and shuttled to temporary holding, all while in complete shock and denial — he had spent the last three years living in the shadow of a nebulous sort of foreboding while simultaneously believing the things he witnessed daily could never happen to him. When another interrogator assigned to play the "good cop" finally came in to question him, Vasiliy initially tried to refute the charges, all while feeling as though watching himself in a mirror. He knew the subtle tricks his own interrogator was using, he knew that the plea deal being held over his head was a mirage — and that one way or another, his imprisonment would end with his signature on the fabricated confession he'd been presented — so, ultimately, he falsely confessed to the standard battery of charges applied to members of the NKVD who had been unfortunate enough to outlive their usefulness: sabotage, espionage, immoral conduct. He was executed with a single bullet to the back of the head a week later. And then he woke up. IV. STOP WHERE YOU STAND / YOU HAVEN'T A CLUE WHO I AM At first he believed that he was cold from blood loss. Vasiliy kept his eyes shut and waited to die — but seconds turned into minutes without a loss of consciousness, and when he began to feel tiny pinpricks of cold wetness on his face, he dared to open his eyes and looked up not at the cement ceiling of an execution chamber but at the pale grey sky, squinting to keep tiny snowflakes from landing in his eyes. He had, for reasons unknown, awoken exactly 76 years after his death. Perhaps more miraculous was that he had a documented presence as a young man born in the city now known as St. Petersburg in the April of 1985. As he slowly adapted to modern life over the next two years, Vasiliy kept a low profile and trained as an EMT; although he's an atheist, he feels strongly compelled to do something to at least balance out the harm he did in a cosmic sort of way. After two years of this he obtained a work visa and fled to America out of fear of being discovered and executed for what he did, figuring it was the last place anyone who knew of his past would think to look, all the while trying to make sense of how unceremoniously he'd been disposed of and how society's perception of the Great Terror had shifted. Three years has been enough time for him to very gradually begin to unlearn his Stalinist programming in a psychological process highly similar to the experience of former cult members, but he's still undeniably a white, ethnic-majority male from 1930. He believes that things in the Soviet Union went horribly awry, but he still sees it as a bad thing that it collapsed/that its satellites gained independence; he still carries the deep resentment of the West that he was conditioned to have (and over time it has grown stronger as he's experienced life in an unapologetically capitalist society); his attitudes on women are very progressive for the era but often fall short of modern leftist perspectives (very narrow definition of what's attractive, reacts more strongly to crass behavior when it's on the part of a woman, etc etc). PERSONALITY Vasiliy is, at his core, driven by a strong, morally dualistic sense of right and wrong. He's improved slightly since entering the 'modern' world, but for the most part, his worldview still has very little room for gray areas. Even abstracted from the time in which he came of age, he still wholeheartedly believes in communism, which appeals to him both because of his exposure to poverty and abuse at the hands of those who held power and because of an innate desire to protect the weak rooted in his personality. It fills much the same role as fervent religion holds for a lot of people — political ideology is a source of emotional security and certainty for him. He finds fulfillment in work and feels it's a part of one's identity. His other motivator is fear. Vasiliy is convinced that if he is discovered for what he is, he will be tried and executed for his hand in the Great Purge, so virtually everything he does is governed by the same sense of looming danger that he lived under for the last four years of his life. He thinks about the potential long-reaching repercussions of his actions in very severe terms and hesitates before publicly aligning himself with anyone else, because the universe he is used to is one in which anyone, even a child, could implicate you for a capital offense. His wariness and unwillingness (and, often, inability) to share unnecessary details, traits which kept him alive during the Great Purge, are now perceived as unfriendliness or extreme introversion. A great deal of the impulses that were rational and understandable during his time — answering the door with a gun tucked into his waistband, refusal to break even small laws through activities like jaywalking — now resonate as paranoia, and they're reflective of a very real pathological lack of trust in the government. He gives police officers in particular a very wide berth because he understands their mentality to a degree that most civilians don't, and he knows from personal experience how deep corruption can run — but this made him seem slightly 'off' and aloof in his near-daily social interactions with the police when he was an EMT during his time alive. In general, Vasiliy does not trust quickly or easily. Reliability and sincerity have to be proven to him, but because of this, he has very few people to confide in. He wasn't raised to have the emotional skills to deal with intense distress alone, either, so he smokes and drinks in lieu of independently addressing his own feelings head-on. He's highly desensitized to violence and is very difficult to rattle, but during the few times when he does feel overwhelmed, his immediate reaction is to step outside to smoke. On an interpersonal level, Vasiliy is friendly, quiet, and confident, uncannily attuned to the body language of others and capable of being highly charismatic. He's compassionate by nature and tends to know what to say (or, at least in the case of his Anglophone friends, what sentiment to express), but despite this, many of the people who interact with him find themselves feeling as though something's ever-so-slightly not right about him. They'd be correct, of course - he came of age during a wildly different time than anything the vast majority of living people have something to truly compare with. Vasiliy is predisposed to value the group over the individual and is willing to make sacrifices beyond what is fair to expect of him; like most second-wave Bolsheviks, he is remarkably hard-working. He still has a few other idiosyncrasies connected to this that crop up routinely: he's humble to a self-deprecating, obviously dishonest degree and can't really take a compliment, and virtually all of his emails and lengthier messages start with an apology ("I'm sorry to bother you, but...", "I'm sorry to waste your time but I must ask...", etc.). Vasiliy hasn't truly processed the shock, betrayal, and grief of being abruptly disposed of by the same political machine that made him feel valued because it's too much for him to take in — while he's able to acknowledge that he was a part of a cruel and flawed system and is trying to (in his mind) repent for his role in the purge, accepting that he was just as disposable as all the members of the NKVD that came before him is too much of a disruption to his understanding of the world to be digestible. He's reached a point at which he's starting to see Stalin for what he truly was, but accepting that almost all of his reality was based on lies is extremely difficult, so it's been a very gradual process. He feels deep guilt and remorse over his role in the Great Purge, but he hasn't told anyone about this (with the exception of two close friends in Chicago) because A) he recognizes that his story sounds completely and entirely false B) telling them would involve reliving many things he tries to avoid thinking about (to include his own execution) and C) he knows it's a lot to take in if his audience does believe him. PHYSICAL APPEARANCE The first thing most people notice about Vasiliy regardless of time or place is his height—if "people" are early 20th century Russians, it's because he's pretty tall at 5'7". If "people" are modern Americans, or even those of the 1960s, it's because he's short. He smells very strongly of cigarette smoke even when he's not smoking; it's in his clothes, his hair, his car, his furniture. More often than not there's a (filterless) cigarette hanging between his fingers or in his mouth, and it shows - his teeth and nails are both faintly yellowed by the habit, although this hasn't progressed any since 1940. Vasiliy's manner of speaking also stands out. He's relatively fluent in English, which he chooses to speak instead of Russian even in situations like this one, where it'll be automatically translated to a character's native language, because his patterns of inflection and word choices are anachronistic for a man allegedly born in 1985. Put simply, he just sounds like someone from the 1930s when he speaks in his own language. He speaks English with a very heavy Russian accent and his speech is often marked by pauses as he tries to think of the word he's looking for, but he's trying. He barely even received any instruction on writing in the Cyrillic alphabet, and despite good hand-eye coordination, his handwriting with the English alphabet is pretty damn bad, with the clumsiness and crooked lines that characterize the lettering of a kid around the age of 7 or 8. Upon closer observation, another thing some people from societies where modern dental care is normalized will notice is his teeth: not only are they moderately yellowed from smoking, they're also uneven, and at the right angle one can see multiple dark gray alloy crowns and fillings on his upper and lower molars, all of them replacements of shoddy and non-standardized dental work performed in the early Soviet Union. Physically, he's in good shape, with above average muscle tone and pretty impressive cardiovascular endurance for a chainsmoker. He jogs and works out in the privacy of his home, partly to maintain physical condition for the physical demands of his job as an EMT, partly because it relieves stress and gives him a small degree of control over his life and a sense of normalcy. He carries himself well, a lot more upright than most people who grew up in later eras, with an air of confidence that somehow carried over from his past life, even though the feeling hasn't. PERMISSIONS WARNINGS/OPT OUT INBOX