<div style="text-align: justify;"><br/><div class="floatright"><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td>  </td></tr></tbody></table></td><td><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td>(http://i.imgur.com/LQdcgIq.jpg)<br/><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">...</div><div class="spoiler_body"><div align="center">(http://i.imgur.com/EvdL7E6.jpg)<br/>(http://www.radiotimes.com/namedimage/Tom_Hardy_hunts_a_killer_in_first_Child_44_trailer.jpg?quality=85&amp;mode=crop&amp;width=620&amp;height=374&amp;404=tv&amp;url=/uploads/images/original/68323.jpg)<br/>(http://40.media.tumblr.com/623ece3127fc6bdeed66108287d35d23/tumblr_niuvvlGRu91qd6jcso1_540.png)<br/>(http://image3.mouthshut.com/images/MoviesMusic/photo/Child-44-49070_6824.jpg)<br/>(http://www.dramastyle.com/images/3/8/20880/Child-44__45.jpg)<br/></div></div></div><br/></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr></tbody></table></div><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 15pt;"><strong>VIKTOR GREKOV</strong></span> [Soviet, NKVD officer]</span><hr/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;">      <em>son of</em> ARES <em>of the</em> DODEKATHEON</span><br/><br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><strong>NATURE:</strong></span><br/>    enigmatic, and mercurial.  his temperament might be excused as the product of the Russian Revolution, but he is infamous, even amongst his comrades, for his intractable, hair triggered temper.  most consider him a two-faced viper with a personality that oscillates between extremes.  in better circumstances, he is redeemed by his humility and cautious intellect -- traits certainly not inherited from his father.  <br/><br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><strong>ATTRIBUTES:</strong></span><br/>    the man appears youthful despite his age (37 years), and while not particularly tall, standing at 1.8m (5'9"), he is barrel chested and solidly built.  in appearance he is ruddy, pale featured, and hirsute.  there is an inelegance to him, almost a portliness that is not striking as the idealized male (or so his lineage suggests).  yet the man still exudes an undeniable primacy and his attention, when focused, smolders with the intensity of a hawk, readying for the kill.<br/>    <br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><strong>ABILITIES:</strong></span><br/>superhuman strength, stamina, and perception<br/><ul class="bbc_list"><li><div style="text-align: justify;">Against Impossible Odds - being part of the Russian military, an institution more capable at killing it's own soldiers than those of the enemy, has made him especially resilient against adversity.  he possesses a heightened awareness of his surroundings, tough wilderness survival skills, and field medicine.</div></li><li><div style="text-align: justify;">Political Spycraft - ironically, it isn't his service in the secret police that has honed his investigative abilities, but rather his paranoia directed at his very comrades.  everyone expects another purge around the corner, and he intends to stay alive by keeping one step ahead of his rivals and friends alike.</div></li><li><div style="text-align: justify;">The Warrior Ideal - physically gifted, he is a practiced athlete and an accomplished soldier, unmatched by many in hand-to-hand or melee combat.  on the battlefield, his very presence has the ability to strike terror in those who face him.</div></li><li><div style="text-align: justify;">Arete Marksman - his gun reflexes are legendary, and he can shoot a feather off a bird.  at least that is what they say.</div></li><li><div style="text-align: justify;">Self-Healing - during battle he can recover nearly instantaneously from some wounds, but there is an upper limit to this effect.</div></li><li><div style="text-align: justify;">Red Light of Mars - he cannot be harmed by fire.  also he can telepathically manipulate or manifest fire to some extent.  this effect is limited small fires no larger than a campfire.</div></li></ul><br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><strong>BIRTHRIGHTS:</strong></span> <br/>currently his superhuman abilities are only enabled by his gifted relics.  without them he is merely mortal.<br/><ul class="bbc_list"><li><div style="text-align: justify;">Tooth of The Nemean Lion - a silver clasped relic from the fabled beast, he wears it now around his neck.  the item grants him limited invulnerability for a short period of time.  like the Nemean lion, he can become impervious to harm, but is still vulnerable to asphyxiation, gasses, and poisons.</div></li><li><div style="text-align: justify;">The Cursed Signet Ring of Lycaon - a questionable gift.  it is both activated and unactivated by touching the blood of a freshly killed person.  when used, it transforms the wearer into a beastly monster for the duration of the conflict.  the wearer also loses self-control and is effectively a berserker in battle-lust.  as beast monster, the wearer possesses the same strengths and weaknesses as a werewolf.  e.g. incredible strength, speed, and regeneration, but with weakness to silver.  additionally, the wearer is also vulnerable to electricity and may be stopped instantly by a proper jolt.</div></li><li><div style="text-align: justify;">Expected Pupil of Chiron - a rare honor that is utterly ignored by Grekov.  in dreams, he is occasionally visited by his assigned mentor, but Grekov avoids the centaur, to his father's chagrin.  Ares expects Grekov to be educated in War.</div></li></ul>     <br/><br/><hr/><br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><strong>HISTORY:</strong></span><br/><div align="center">    <em>“Hail to you Ares, martial, seething lord<br/>    You from whom all war’s terrors have poured<br/>    As tears have poured from sorrow’s rain<br/>    Mixing with bloodshed, the crimson stain<br/>    That becomes a lamentable river which flows.”</em></div><br/><div style="text-align: right;"><em>you think there is a place for you when you die.  even at the banks of charon, you know the the dead will step away from you.  because you have a disease, a stain, that colors you as fetid as a stench.  they should know your name.  they should hear your step.  with the instruments in hand, the tools for killing, it is macabre, a theatre of pain, and you've lost something long ago, like a burnt out tree with nothing left inside, just brittle to the wind.</em></div><br/><div class="spoiler_container"><div class="spoiler_header" onclick="hideSecond (this);" role="button">...</div><div class="spoiler_body">    He was conscripted at a young age and ostensibly raised in, what was at the time, the Russian Imperial Army.  When the Great War began in 1914, Grekov was marched with millions of others to the Eastern Front.  He was sixteen at the time, and he fought in numerous ill-fated campaigns in the Polish territories.  That Grekov had a childhood, much less parents, is irrelevant to him.  He remembers very little of his life before the army save that he was continually hungry and barefooted in the streets of Petrograd (St. Petersburg).  If his mother did ever exist, he cannot pick her face out amongst the many tired hags who'd cast him out of their kitchen doors with a black heel of bread and a hiss.  In all his life, he'd never known a comforting hand or a place to call a home, but in the late days of the Empire and the chaos that would follow, Grekov's experiences were quintessentially Russian.<br/><br/>During the Great War the Eastern campaign was already a disaster long before the start of the Revolution.  The soldiers who survived against those incredible losses, ill supplied and often unarmed, grew hardened and tired of the stupidity of the autocracy.  The soldiers were hungry for an answer, and Marxist doctrine spread quietly through the camps.  <br/><br/>Grekov bore his own personal hatred toward his commanders, and although Grekov had no interest in the Bolshevik's ideology, he was smart enough to employ it's language when he lead a mutiny against the Imperial officers.  Taking command of a squadron, Grekov abandoned the front and marched back to Petrograd to participate in the Revolution.  He was only nineteen at the time.<br/><br/>In Petrograd he was given an officer's commission in the newly formed Red Army, and as squadron commander, he was turned against his old compatriots in what then became the Russian Civil War.  He proved to be a poor strategist, but a talented tactical commander.  Tending to favor the offense, his command yielded results, but often at significant costs.  This was tolerable in the new Order as it was in the old Order.  Grekov had no qualms impressing new recruits from the countryside often with torture and the threat of execution.  <br/><br/>His ruthlessness distinguished him, and when the loyalist White Armies were finally crushed in 1921, the Bolshevik leadership advanced men like Grekov into more trust worthy positions against anti-revolutionary sentiment.  Grekov was placed in one of the branches of the secret police, the so named Joint State Political Directorate or OGPU.<br/><br/>Terror and discord became his daily fare.  Around every corner waited a potential counter-revolutionary.  It didn't matter if they were traitors, simply malcontents, or the wrongly accused.  The machinery of the secret police ran upon blood and bones, and it ate everything in its path.  So it was for Grekov, working in the name of the Soviet cause: he not only killed without arrest or trial but made medieval examples of these deaths as was the method of the new Order.  Gruesome and blood-thirsty, Grekov at first inured himself to the frightening torture he inflicted, but in time he learned to enjoy it.<br/><br/>Success offered rapid advancement in the Bolshevik party, but many understood the precariousness of lofty positions.  With the death of Lenin in 1924 and the consolidation of the party under Stalin, cautious men such as Grekov sought transfers out of domestic affairs.  Anti-Bolshevik organizers had fled from Russia during the Revolution and the foreign office was tasked in their extradition or assassinations.  Under new assignment, Grekov found operations in Hungary, France, and Spain.  Yet, no matter how far he attempted to place himself from the political madness of the Soviet authority, something as a blackhole into which everything is crushed and out of which nothing can truly escape, Grekov himself became bound by the most unexpected turn of events.<br/><br/>As a means to entrap officers in sensitive positions, Grekov had been given a wife who was also the daughter of a high ranked military officer.  His wife and him were not only strangers but also expected to report on one another.  Unsurprisingly, his marriage to Natasha was strained from the start.  Yet in 1930, Natasha bore Grekov a daughter, whom they named Sophia.  The event changed the man in ways that he does not fully comprehend.  The purposelessness of his work and life came into high relief when he first held his daughter in his arms.  For Grekov and Natasha, 'love' was a bourgeois luxury and fantasy that had no use inside the worker's cause.  But Grekov loved Sophia, and through Sophia he came to love Natasha too.  <br/><br/>It became an impossible situation, because over time he found himself unable to report on his wife.  And as a gulf widened between him and the Party, a rage began to build in him toward the authority who kept his family as hostages and as a means to ensure his loyalty.<br/><br/>Eventually, fearing for the future of his family, Grekov began searching for a way to secret his wife and child outside of Soviet control.  In 1933, Grekov attempted to defect with Natasha to the United States.  Unfortunately, his contacts were already compromised and the offer of asylum was all along a OGPU set-up.  The trap sprung with Grekov right in the middle of it.  He was taken with his wife and child into OGPU custody.  Separated from his family, Grekov was held and tortured for information.  After weeks and months of agony, utterly broken by the secret police, his former colleagues, Grekov was briefly reunited with his wife.  Familiar with the tactic, Grekov begged his torturers to make it quick for his wife's sake.  They denied him even that and instead tied him to a log and fed him into a furnace feet first.  His wife, Natasha was of course obliged to watch.<br/><br/>Burned alive, Grekov should have died.  But in the final moments, he visited by his father Ares.  Time became intangible and the interim between seconds grew into infinity.  In one instance he was melting, feeling the fire char the flesh from his bones.  In the other instance he was standing in a sea of flame and beholding a god.  No words were exchanged; instead only an understanding that stretched back into the twilight of arcanum.  He came to see what he was, although he would not understand why.  <br/><br/>Ares, his father, restored him in body, and through the enlivened ichor in Grekov's veins, Ares granted his son the power over fire.  Returned to the world and to everyone's horror, Grekov emerged from the furnace, naked though unharmed.  He slew his torturers with his bare hands, and then freed his wife, Natasha.  Expecting her to flee with him was a foolish mistake.  In the instance he turned his back to her, she unloaded a pistol into him.  <br/><br/><em>It is 1934 and Grekov has been caged for study by the newly formed People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs or NKVD.  His existence is a deeply held Party secret of which only a handful of officials are privy too.  Unable to explain what he is, they are at least able to discern his superhuman abilities.  At first they attempted to replicate it in other subjects, but were unable to.  Eventually it was decided that he was too valuable an asset not to employ against enemies of the State.</em> <br/><br/>On the eve of 1935, Grekov was summoned to see the Premier himself.  The man was first shown his daughter, at the time only four.  The girl doesn't recognize Grekov as her father, but the man was complacent to his captors' demands because the implication was clear.  His captors, trusting his continued obedience, released him from his prison and escorted him to the Kremlin in Moscow. <br/><br/>There he was honored at the Hall of St. Andreyevsky in the Grand Palace by a well attended ceremony and presented by the Premier the Order of Lenin for his exemplary service, details unnamed.  In good humor, the Premier teased Grekov for his 'hot-blooded' nature, as an understandable quality of any true son of Russia.  He was forgiven his lack of 'tactfulness' but was advised that the communist paradise requires all men to put aside their baser natures for the better good of democracy.  All the while, Grekov could see his daughter, Sophia in the rear of the Hall.  He knew he cannot possibly reach her in time.  And then she is gone before the end of the ceremony.  It would be the last time he would see her in person.<br/><br/>Shortly after, Grekov was introduced to the new division of the NKVD, the Special Sciences Service (SSS).  Assigned the position as it's first tactical agent, Grekov was attached to an investigation on the activities of the Nazi Ahnenerbe Institute and other non-Soviet occult initiatives.  The NKVD, knowing that he had nowhere to run to nor the motivation to double-cross them again, allowed him surprising latitude in his work for the SSS.  <br/><br/>His primary objectives now, beyond those of the SSS, is the discovery of others like him; and their capture, and delivery into NKVD study and indoctrination.  Indeed, Grekov has no qualms in causing other people's misfortune.  He however, is calculating in how efficient of an agent he is.  He recognizes that he can easily use up his usefulness and so only succeeds as much as is necessary to maintain his value to the NKVD.  He must bid his time, because an opportunity will eventually present itself.  And then when his handlers slip up, he will make all of them suffer...  beyond what they could ever, <em>ever</em> imagine.</div></div><br/></div>