Parasha Volkonskiy

Born in Diskon, a small town/city on the Kara Sea on the very tip of Russia, Parasha’s demeanor and temperment were didacted at an early age. Bleak in its lifelessness - the only food, fish and what animals could sustain themselves in the eight month darkness of winter. From an early age hard labour was the only way to have even a chance at survival.

Parasha’s parents died the winter after his birth and his three aunts took the nephew in and made him toil for that saving grace right until the day he left to join the army at sixteen. Those years were misery and nigritude. The army was the most logical choice for him, the only one he knew of save becoming a fisherman. The pallid adolescent did not want to exist here and needed escape.

The army was as forbidding as Diskon and once again, toil was the only way to survive, but unlike Diskon he grew skilled, respected, and noticed. Soon he was as good as he could get in the limited fields of an infantryman. After three years normal service at the top of all fields of training his corporal’s reccommendations for Parasha’s transfer to a more suitable position were noted and Parasha was transfered into special force training.

No longer at the height of the rubbish pile, Parasha climbed once again up the heap seeking room to breathe and found none. Seven more years and he was among the highly trained army division, but bureaucracy stamped him down into claustrophobia. When Communism toppled in 1991 Parasha fled the Special Forces, and after eliminating seven Special Force Operatives sent to recapture him, the division got the idea, especially when three of them found personalised messages written at their work desks knifed to their chairs. The Special Forces pronounced him dead, but continued to keep tabs on him.

From there Parasha worked Freelance, finding work with the White Russian Branch of the Mafia, who nicknamed him ‘Koschei the Deathless’ for his ability to survive and transcend and dangerous situation. A few terrorrist groups hired him to eliminate small time politicians and Parasha’s assassinations of key townsfolk helped the liberation of the outlying Baltic states. He found work in the Serbian army and massacred many in the cause of money, but Parasha never lingered in one job for too long.

Parasha is dangerous. Versatile, he has been trained in a vast field; technology, weapons, martial arts, sabotage, poisoning, etc. With no family or friends he has no ties and the only thing that guides him is money and that is only cursory. He is seemingly loyal and is compliant. A flaw that he has picked up over the last eight years since Communism’s fall is that of a penchant for underage sex with adolescent girls - a neurosis that effuses as rape; physical and emotional. He has noticed that his body has started winding down. At 32, still at prime physical stature to most, his body is beginning to show signs of the hard existence he has had - in part a reason for leaving the wars and entering the city looking for less taxing work.

Pale, white… skin like frost and eyes milked creme, he is handsome, but not in the respect of standing out. His long black hair is streaked with grey and ties back to a pony-tail. He dresses heavily (kevlar vest and room to conceal his AK97) in a brown WWI trenchcoat, a suit underneath or whatever to suit the occasion.

GAMEMASTERING HINTS: Be polite. Offer suggestions and generally appear well-meaning. You are threatening only to those whom you need to be to, and then it is with unnerving politeness which is mistaken for professionalism. As soon as someone begins to cage you in you leave.

NOTE: Parasha is somewhat generic. Campaign use, he is a puppet of Malkuth (working through Chagidiel), who offers his services , as bodyguard and killer, to Sergei (whose popularity grows as this new drug he offers becomes more and more popular) to protect him from the Mafia. Through Parasha I hope to increase the net of contacts characters will have to build as their drug empire grows more and more unsteady.