Mercury City App
Dec. 29th, 2013 04:56 pmPlayer Info
Player Name: Shade
Over 18?: Yes. 23
Contact:
Name: Maxim Novik (Максим НОВИК)
Alias: Night Surgeon
Age and birthdate: 64, 1/14/1961. Looks 45, explained below.
Home city: Mercury City
Type: Neutral
Occupation: Back
Appearance: Maxim stands at an even 6'0", with a lean, muscular build. His hair, a darkish blonde that is going to silver, is kept long and usually swept back from his face. He has quite a few tattoos, two of which are have connections to the Russian Mafia.
While he no longer wears a costume, back in his supervillain days, he wore a 19th-century surgeon's coat and a dirty, bloody surgeon's mask.
Personality: Most doctors have some measure of compassion and kindness for their patients. If ever there was any in Maxim, it was burnt out long ago. What has remained is a cold, hard-eyed, cynical man who won’t hesitate if he has to shoot someone in the eye if they annoy him too much. His entire demeanor gives off aura of “Don’t fuck with me.” As a former supervillain, he’s inherently a little bit selfish and always looking out for himself. He doesn’t think twice about making tough choices. After all, it’s kept him alive this long.
His moods are mercurial and one can never predict just how he’s going to react. His emotions swing back and forth on a pendulum from one extreme to other. He might start out laughing and amused at the beginning of a conversation and be ready to fight the same person by the end of it. His mood swings carry over into his work. He might choose to heal a superhero that walks through his door one day and then refuse to help them the very next day.
He’s taciturn with his words and likes to play up the Russian stereotype of speaking broken English card despite the fact he’s been in the country over three decades. When people think he’s stupider than he is and can’t understand them, they reveal a lot more around him. Maxim is also a consummate liar, which is one of his great skills. He’ll weave a story with threads of the truth poking out here and there, but then change it all again at the next telling.
Underneath the surface, Maxim is very much the same. What you see is what you get with him. He doesn't try to hide what he’s thinking or feeling. There is his own code of conduct that he follows, though it’s far more skewed than any hero or normal person’s would be. Though he is harsh and cynical, he would never turn away an injured child, and more than once has gruffly waved off payment from individuals whom he has judged worthy of receiving a small kindness.
Personal history: Maxim Novik is the quintessential mysterious figure in the shadows and he likes to keep it that way. Even the file SWORD keeps on him is missing crucial information on his childhood and early adulthood. He’s a shameless liar and the story of who he is and where he comes from changes with every telling. At various times, he’s claimed to have been an enforcer for the Bratva, a heart surgeon, spy, vegetable-seller, forger, thief, and a host of other identities.
The basic facts, scraped together from various sources, are these. Maxim was born in the former Soviet Union, and while he’s evasive about the exact location, his accent pegs him as originally being from Belarus. There was no mother or father in sight when he was a child. The story of what happened to them is something even Maxim isn’t sure of. He suspects fuzzy memories of his parents’ outspoken political activism meant they ended up quietly being wiped off the map like so many other problems the Soviet government dealt with. He grew up fast, hard, and tough on the streets. He’d been aware of his powers, a genetic mutation to heal himself since he was a child, using it to keep from freezing to death while sleeping in abandoned buildings.
Knowing instinctively that those who were different were singled out, he kept quiet, only using them to heal the occasional cuts and bruises he received. Though a loner by nature, when a local street gang approached the hard-eyed teen and gave him the choice of joining or getting jumped, he made the smart choice, figuring there was safety in numbers. A small news article translated from Cyrillic in his file makes mention of a teenage mutant matching his description who, in 1977, was involved in a head-on collision. He healed the little girl who had been in the backseat of the other car in front of witnesses before limping away from the crash site, leaving the other driver and passenger for dead. The incident is noted in his file as an example of his developing personality.
After that incident, there were few outright mentions of the young mutant until he reached adulthood. As a supervillain with a touch that could heal or kill at will, he was dubbed the Night Surgeon by the press. On the scale of robbing banks to coming up with plans for global domination, he was placed firmly in the middle. Maxim was driven by his own code of conduct, pushing just hard enough to get what he wanted when he wanted it. He still left a trail of bodies behind him, and subsequently, gained many enemies, the least of which were several Soviet superheroes.
His main enemy was Red Katya, a female superhero who could fly and shoot plasma bolts from her hands. They met shortly after he had begun his career and would last until Red Katya’s death shortly before the Soviet Union fell. Theirs was a complicated, cat-and-mouse style of relationship. Despite his otherwise cold demeanor, Maxim never could bring himself to kill her. Though he was defeated by Red Katya and other supers several times, he always managed to escape before he could end up arrested or in jail. The USSR was not kind to anyone rocking the status quo, least of all supervillains.
When it looked like the Soviet Union was going to fall in the late 80s, things began to go downhill for him. He’d made too many enemies and had too few allies over the years. It seemed like everywhere he turned, there was someone trying to put him in a cage. The mob and the government were both eager to get their hands on a mutant who could control life and death with a finger’s touch, and more importantly, potentially make them eternally young. Things got even worse when Katya was killed by a stray bullet when she was stopping a mundane grocery store robbery. Maxim took her death hard, something which he has never admitted to anyone.
Around 1988, the Night Surgeon hung up his (metaphorical) cape. He was spotted a few times in Belarus, looking the worse for the wear as a man being ruthlessly hunted down. There was one final bloody shoot-out with the police in Minsk before he disappeared for good.
He ran to America, always one step ahead of those who were still hunting him. A year and a half later, the weary ex-supervillain took up residence in Mercury City, simply staying in the location because he was too tired to run any further. He was done with power plays and trying to continue playing the bad guy. So he set up a floating back-room clinic under his old villain name, the kind willing to treat anyone for any injury for the right price. Superhero, supervillain, failed mugger, and innocent victim, he’ll treat them all alike if they can meet the price he’s asking, whether it be money, a favor owed, or merely tickets to the latest Beatles Revival concert.
About a decade after he landed in California, Maxim met a woman named Diane Gold. They formed an instant connection and he began to think he'd found "the one." He began to think about going straight and leaving his dark days behind him. When he revealed that he had powers and began to explain his past, Diane rejected him, shocking Maxim with a deep-seated prejudice towards people with powers. He left her pregnant with a baby girl. He reappeared briefly to give what they had one more chance and try to become a family.
Diane remained frigid towards him, but one night of too much drinking later and she got pregnant again. Realizing he was never going to recapture what he wanted, Maxim took off for good this time. He consoled himself with the thought that he would never have been father of the year material. His kids were better off without an ex-supervillain as their father. But still, he occasionally wonders about what happened to his little girl Keren and the son he's never met. (Note: This part of his backstory has been cleared with the player of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
keren .)
Some know a little about his past, although most of his exploits never made it past the Iron Curtain, and certainly not past the criminal rumor circuit. Night Surgeon has one rule that everyone who walks, limps, or bleeds their way through his door has to follow: Neutrality. Nobody is allowed to fight on his turf, whether it is rival gang members or a supervillain trying to settle the score with their weakened arch nemesis. Those who don’t follow the one rule end up bleeding out from every old injury Maxim can possibly rip open.
Powers: Maxim has the mutation to heal and give injuries with a touch of his hands. If he lays his hands on someone, he can feel their pain and injuries inside his head as a form of psychic scanning. When he heals someone, he charges their body with a form of energy that can heal even the worst types of injuries. On the cellular level, it encourages rapid new growth, healing a broken bone in minutes instead of months. It’s an experience that can be as painful or painless as he chooses, depending on how sadistic he’s feeling towards his patients.
On the flip side, when he touches someone, he can also sense every old injury they’ve received in the past. If he chooses, he can rip open their old wounds.
His abilities do have their limits. He can’t reattach severed limbs or knocked out teeth, regenerate lost blood, or permanently heal reoccurring conditions like STDs. While he can help with permanent illnesses like cancer, he can’t get rid of them completely. He can’t heal anyone who has been poisoned, as there is an odd backlash on his own system when he tries. The person he’s healing also has to be alive. Anyone who has been dead even a minute is beyond his help.
His abilities are constantly "switched on" for his own body, allowing himself to heal his own wounds at a much more rapid rate than a regular human being. Being able to heal himself has also given Maxim the ability to keep his own cells from aging any faster than he would like them to. Instead, he can constantly make them heal themselves, halting his age. It’s an ability that took a while to discover and even longer to perfect. While he could potentially age himself back even further, he’s comfortable staying frozen at the age of forty-five.
Skills: Maxim has acquired several outside abilities over the course of his life. He’s a good shot with a gun, usually keeping a Glock around for protection, and has some skill with a knife as well. He’s decent in a fight, though mostly he relies on luck rather than skill to get him out of a jam. He picked up the ability to forge documents at some point and has a few extra aliases stored away in case of an emergency. While he never went to medical school, he has extensively studied anatomy texts, and has a good working knowledge of the human body. He can speak fluent Russian, Belarusian, and English.
Weaknesses: Maxim's main weakness is his arrogance. He's gotten away with a lot in his life without suffering any consequences. It's made him cocky as a result, something that is eventually going to come back to bite him in the ass when he gets too sloppy and screws up. He's a loner by nature, which isn't the best way to be in a business where his rude, blunt nature can make him a lot of enemies.
RP Goals: I've always had a fondness for morally grey characters. I feel like Maxim is a character who, with CR, could either fall back into being a bad guy or reluctantly become a hero. His occupation also means he can interact with a lot of characters, not only superheroes, but more mundane characters as well.
Third person sample: Maxim was tired, plain and simple. It had been a busy night, the kind where every small-time villain and hero ended up walking through the back door of the condemned building he was working out of. He finally shooed his last patient out the door, washed the blood off his hands, and prepared to close up the shop.
Then what seemed like half the gang members of Mercury City tumbled through his door. They spoke to him rapidly in a combination of Spanish and English. He got the gist of what had happened, a drive-by shooting from a rival gang. Their leader and another boy had both been shot. He turned to both patients, touching their necks lightly to assess their injuries.
He grimaced as he removed his hand from the gang leader, the victim of two gunshot wounds to the stomach. The touch of a corpse always sent an eerie, dead feeling into his mind. "Can't help that one."
The second-in-command, who had done most of the talking, narrowed his eyes. "Can't or won't?" He asked in a demanding tone.
Maxim gave the commander a warning glare. "Only one who can help him is a coroner." He turned his attention to the other boy, a kid who couldn't have been more than fifteen. He'd been shot in the back, the bullet going straight through. The boy was biting his lips, trying so hard to be brave. Maxim cracked his knuckles. It looked like his night had just become even longer. "Get him onto the table there. Then get out. We will talk payment later."
In Character Responses
The greater good is… whatever each person wants it to be. For me, that is looking out for and making sure I get what I want, when I want it.
Your greatest strengths are… my powers. No doubt I would be dead five times over if not for being able to heal myself. Being lucky also helps too.
Killing is… what has gotten me this far in life. I don't enjoy doing it, but it was and still is necessary for survival.
Teachers and mentor figures would say you are… Well, if they weren't all dead, they'd probably say I am stubborn and blunt. Maybe, also, that I am good at what I do.
Sacrifice is… a means to getting an end. That self-sacrificing hero code is bullshit. Never found a cause yet for using it to help another person.
When you were younger you… were a lot dumber than I am now. If ever I find someone who has time-traveling abilities, I am fixing the mistakes of my youth first thing.
Player Name: Shade
Over 18?: Yes. 23
Contact:
Email: PM for it.
AIM: unlimitedbytime
Plurk: light_shade
Timezone: PST
Characters already in game: None
Name: Maxim Novik (Максим НОВИК)
Alias: Night Surgeon
Age and birthdate: 64, 1/14/1961. Looks 45, explained below.
Home city: Mercury City
Type: Neutral
Occupation: Back
Appearance: Maxim stands at an even 6'0", with a lean, muscular build. His hair, a darkish blonde that is going to silver, is kept long and usually swept back from his face. He has quite a few tattoos, two of which are have connections to the Russian Mafia.
While he no longer wears a costume, back in his supervillain days, he wore a 19th-century surgeon's coat and a dirty, bloody surgeon's mask.
Personality: Most doctors have some measure of compassion and kindness for their patients. If ever there was any in Maxim, it was burnt out long ago. What has remained is a cold, hard-eyed, cynical man who won’t hesitate if he has to shoot someone in the eye if they annoy him too much. His entire demeanor gives off aura of “Don’t fuck with me.” As a former supervillain, he’s inherently a little bit selfish and always looking out for himself. He doesn’t think twice about making tough choices. After all, it’s kept him alive this long.
His moods are mercurial and one can never predict just how he’s going to react. His emotions swing back and forth on a pendulum from one extreme to other. He might start out laughing and amused at the beginning of a conversation and be ready to fight the same person by the end of it. His mood swings carry over into his work. He might choose to heal a superhero that walks through his door one day and then refuse to help them the very next day.
He’s taciturn with his words and likes to play up the Russian stereotype of speaking broken English card despite the fact he’s been in the country over three decades. When people think he’s stupider than he is and can’t understand them, they reveal a lot more around him. Maxim is also a consummate liar, which is one of his great skills. He’ll weave a story with threads of the truth poking out here and there, but then change it all again at the next telling.
Underneath the surface, Maxim is very much the same. What you see is what you get with him. He doesn't try to hide what he’s thinking or feeling. There is his own code of conduct that he follows, though it’s far more skewed than any hero or normal person’s would be. Though he is harsh and cynical, he would never turn away an injured child, and more than once has gruffly waved off payment from individuals whom he has judged worthy of receiving a small kindness.
Personal history: Maxim Novik is the quintessential mysterious figure in the shadows and he likes to keep it that way. Even the file SWORD keeps on him is missing crucial information on his childhood and early adulthood. He’s a shameless liar and the story of who he is and where he comes from changes with every telling. At various times, he’s claimed to have been an enforcer for the Bratva, a heart surgeon, spy, vegetable-seller, forger, thief, and a host of other identities.
The basic facts, scraped together from various sources, are these. Maxim was born in the former Soviet Union, and while he’s evasive about the exact location, his accent pegs him as originally being from Belarus. There was no mother or father in sight when he was a child. The story of what happened to them is something even Maxim isn’t sure of. He suspects fuzzy memories of his parents’ outspoken political activism meant they ended up quietly being wiped off the map like so many other problems the Soviet government dealt with. He grew up fast, hard, and tough on the streets. He’d been aware of his powers, a genetic mutation to heal himself since he was a child, using it to keep from freezing to death while sleeping in abandoned buildings.
Knowing instinctively that those who were different were singled out, he kept quiet, only using them to heal the occasional cuts and bruises he received. Though a loner by nature, when a local street gang approached the hard-eyed teen and gave him the choice of joining or getting jumped, he made the smart choice, figuring there was safety in numbers. A small news article translated from Cyrillic in his file makes mention of a teenage mutant matching his description who, in 1977, was involved in a head-on collision. He healed the little girl who had been in the backseat of the other car in front of witnesses before limping away from the crash site, leaving the other driver and passenger for dead. The incident is noted in his file as an example of his developing personality.
After that incident, there were few outright mentions of the young mutant until he reached adulthood. As a supervillain with a touch that could heal or kill at will, he was dubbed the Night Surgeon by the press. On the scale of robbing banks to coming up with plans for global domination, he was placed firmly in the middle. Maxim was driven by his own code of conduct, pushing just hard enough to get what he wanted when he wanted it. He still left a trail of bodies behind him, and subsequently, gained many enemies, the least of which were several Soviet superheroes.
His main enemy was Red Katya, a female superhero who could fly and shoot plasma bolts from her hands. They met shortly after he had begun his career and would last until Red Katya’s death shortly before the Soviet Union fell. Theirs was a complicated, cat-and-mouse style of relationship. Despite his otherwise cold demeanor, Maxim never could bring himself to kill her. Though he was defeated by Red Katya and other supers several times, he always managed to escape before he could end up arrested or in jail. The USSR was not kind to anyone rocking the status quo, least of all supervillains.
When it looked like the Soviet Union was going to fall in the late 80s, things began to go downhill for him. He’d made too many enemies and had too few allies over the years. It seemed like everywhere he turned, there was someone trying to put him in a cage. The mob and the government were both eager to get their hands on a mutant who could control life and death with a finger’s touch, and more importantly, potentially make them eternally young. Things got even worse when Katya was killed by a stray bullet when she was stopping a mundane grocery store robbery. Maxim took her death hard, something which he has never admitted to anyone.
Around 1988, the Night Surgeon hung up his (metaphorical) cape. He was spotted a few times in Belarus, looking the worse for the wear as a man being ruthlessly hunted down. There was one final bloody shoot-out with the police in Minsk before he disappeared for good.
He ran to America, always one step ahead of those who were still hunting him. A year and a half later, the weary ex-supervillain took up residence in Mercury City, simply staying in the location because he was too tired to run any further. He was done with power plays and trying to continue playing the bad guy. So he set up a floating back-room clinic under his old villain name, the kind willing to treat anyone for any injury for the right price. Superhero, supervillain, failed mugger, and innocent victim, he’ll treat them all alike if they can meet the price he’s asking, whether it be money, a favor owed, or merely tickets to the latest Beatles Revival concert.
About a decade after he landed in California, Maxim met a woman named Diane Gold. They formed an instant connection and he began to think he'd found "the one." He began to think about going straight and leaving his dark days behind him. When he revealed that he had powers and began to explain his past, Diane rejected him, shocking Maxim with a deep-seated prejudice towards people with powers. He left her pregnant with a baby girl. He reappeared briefly to give what they had one more chance and try to become a family.
Diane remained frigid towards him, but one night of too much drinking later and she got pregnant again. Realizing he was never going to recapture what he wanted, Maxim took off for good this time. He consoled himself with the thought that he would never have been father of the year material. His kids were better off without an ex-supervillain as their father. But still, he occasionally wonders about what happened to his little girl Keren and the son he's never met. (Note: This part of his backstory has been cleared with the player of
keren .)Some know a little about his past, although most of his exploits never made it past the Iron Curtain, and certainly not past the criminal rumor circuit. Night Surgeon has one rule that everyone who walks, limps, or bleeds their way through his door has to follow: Neutrality. Nobody is allowed to fight on his turf, whether it is rival gang members or a supervillain trying to settle the score with their weakened arch nemesis. Those who don’t follow the one rule end up bleeding out from every old injury Maxim can possibly rip open.
Powers: Maxim has the mutation to heal and give injuries with a touch of his hands. If he lays his hands on someone, he can feel their pain and injuries inside his head as a form of psychic scanning. When he heals someone, he charges their body with a form of energy that can heal even the worst types of injuries. On the cellular level, it encourages rapid new growth, healing a broken bone in minutes instead of months. It’s an experience that can be as painful or painless as he chooses, depending on how sadistic he’s feeling towards his patients.
On the flip side, when he touches someone, he can also sense every old injury they’ve received in the past. If he chooses, he can rip open their old wounds.
His abilities do have their limits. He can’t reattach severed limbs or knocked out teeth, regenerate lost blood, or permanently heal reoccurring conditions like STDs. While he can help with permanent illnesses like cancer, he can’t get rid of them completely. He can’t heal anyone who has been poisoned, as there is an odd backlash on his own system when he tries. The person he’s healing also has to be alive. Anyone who has been dead even a minute is beyond his help.
His abilities are constantly "switched on" for his own body, allowing himself to heal his own wounds at a much more rapid rate than a regular human being. Being able to heal himself has also given Maxim the ability to keep his own cells from aging any faster than he would like them to. Instead, he can constantly make them heal themselves, halting his age. It’s an ability that took a while to discover and even longer to perfect. While he could potentially age himself back even further, he’s comfortable staying frozen at the age of forty-five.
Skills: Maxim has acquired several outside abilities over the course of his life. He’s a good shot with a gun, usually keeping a Glock around for protection, and has some skill with a knife as well. He’s decent in a fight, though mostly he relies on luck rather than skill to get him out of a jam. He picked up the ability to forge documents at some point and has a few extra aliases stored away in case of an emergency. While he never went to medical school, he has extensively studied anatomy texts, and has a good working knowledge of the human body. He can speak fluent Russian, Belarusian, and English.
Weaknesses: Maxim's main weakness is his arrogance. He's gotten away with a lot in his life without suffering any consequences. It's made him cocky as a result, something that is eventually going to come back to bite him in the ass when he gets too sloppy and screws up. He's a loner by nature, which isn't the best way to be in a business where his rude, blunt nature can make him a lot of enemies.
RP Goals: I've always had a fondness for morally grey characters. I feel like Maxim is a character who, with CR, could either fall back into being a bad guy or reluctantly become a hero. His occupation also means he can interact with a lot of characters, not only superheroes, but more mundane characters as well.
Third person sample: Maxim was tired, plain and simple. It had been a busy night, the kind where every small-time villain and hero ended up walking through the back door of the condemned building he was working out of. He finally shooed his last patient out the door, washed the blood off his hands, and prepared to close up the shop.
Then what seemed like half the gang members of Mercury City tumbled through his door. They spoke to him rapidly in a combination of Spanish and English. He got the gist of what had happened, a drive-by shooting from a rival gang. Their leader and another boy had both been shot. He turned to both patients, touching their necks lightly to assess their injuries.
He grimaced as he removed his hand from the gang leader, the victim of two gunshot wounds to the stomach. The touch of a corpse always sent an eerie, dead feeling into his mind. "Can't help that one."
The second-in-command, who had done most of the talking, narrowed his eyes. "Can't or won't?" He asked in a demanding tone.
Maxim gave the commander a warning glare. "Only one who can help him is a coroner." He turned his attention to the other boy, a kid who couldn't have been more than fifteen. He'd been shot in the back, the bullet going straight through. The boy was biting his lips, trying so hard to be brave. Maxim cracked his knuckles. It looked like his night had just become even longer. "Get him onto the table there. Then get out. We will talk payment later."
In Character Responses
The greater good is… whatever each person wants it to be. For me, that is looking out for and making sure I get what I want, when I want it.
Your greatest strengths are… my powers. No doubt I would be dead five times over if not for being able to heal myself. Being lucky also helps too.
Killing is… what has gotten me this far in life. I don't enjoy doing it, but it was and still is necessary for survival.
Teachers and mentor figures would say you are… Well, if they weren't all dead, they'd probably say I am stubborn and blunt. Maybe, also, that I am good at what I do.
Sacrifice is… a means to getting an end. That self-sacrificing hero code is bullshit. Never found a cause yet for using it to help another person.
When you were younger you… were a lot dumber than I am now. If ever I find someone who has time-traveling abilities, I am fixing the mistakes of my youth first thing.
