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vibishan
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shipoftheseus
E-mail: pm please
Other Characters:Anya Lehnsherr, the Risen Emperor, Dillon Cole Shuos Jedao, Dogma, and Dancy Flammarion
Character Name: Petr Dmitrov
Series: The Postmortal by Drew Magary
Age: Actual age 67; cure age/physical age 22.
From When?: Several years after his interview with Mascis; I'm headcanoning that he's killed during a skirmish on the outskirts of the Artic War.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Dmitrov has spent most of his life murdering and pillaging, first for the Russian army, and then for his own unit after their defection.
Item:
Abilities/Powers: He's a baseline human physiologically, except that he does not age, and he's been an active soldier for over forty years. His hand-to-hand skills are, by sheer dint of decades of practice, with no slowing down due to age, pretty phenomenal for a non-enhanced human. In the same vein, he's a crack shot and has a lot of useful survival and military skills. As he is an officer, he also has some command training, although how much other/college equivalent education he received for/with his commission in Solevyev's military is unknown, and probably less than a Russian Federation officer would receive today.
Personality: Dmitrov is a really extreme case of nature versus nurture. He is, or would have been, by nature, a really gentle person. He always uses the euphemisms first when he's talking about the atrocities he's perpetuated - 'resource collection' instead of pillaging, 'temporary use' instead of 'rape camps'. He doesn't want to say those things - to face them or to inflict them on his interlocutor. When he can afford to do it, he flinches; he softens the harshness of the truth. He's relieved by the advent of the water purges, because even though locking people up to die of dehydration is markedly crueler than shooting them, he says he was just relieved that he didn't have to watch them die, didn't have to do it directly. His mind, even after twenty years, shies away from the horrors rather than becoming entirely callous to them.
He's not a firebrand. He's not a man of great strength or principles, but he's also not simply a coward. He wanted to trust in his superiors and accept their justifications, because it made the things he was doing, things he hated, more bearable. He's trying to wrest a bearable existence from an unbearable world. He doesn't resist the terrible things he is called upon to do, but he also never really manages to emotionally accept them. He can shut down and ignore his empathy but never excise it. He is never molded into someone who enjoys cruelty, even though this is a very common developmental defense mechanism for people in similar circumstances.
He's hurt deeply as a child when his grandmother was ripped away from his family and disappeared, and he decides in a resigned, pragmatic way that he must be on the side with the power, but there's always an awareness of the cost of his decision. When he takes another old woman away from her own family, he completely knows that he is what he feared, that "I was the guy who stole my grandmother! That was me!" When he talks about his growing resentments of Solevyev's regime, he doesn't just talk about not getting his cut, he talks about "sacrificing our very souls"...and not getting a cut.
He has this very quintessentially Russian fatalism, this cynical acceptance, without despondency, of the world as a place where there is never enough, where there is never close to enough, where power is never used responsibly, because the police and the mafiya are the same except their clothes, where systems can never be relied upon, and where life, meager as it is, is still something to be trudged mulishly through, scrabbling for a little to hold onto, rather than despaired of. He doesn't disobey his orders as a younger man because life is still better than oblivion; but he also accepts his own mortality in a way that many of the cured do not. He knows he can't survive in the brutal, collapsing world forever. He strikes a balance between knowing that the punishment for his desertion will almost certainly be death, eventually, preferring to die free with something he has managed to take and keep for himself, and an unwillingness to sacrifice his life straight away.
He chooses to give the interview to Mascis, to face and discuss and bare his history to the world, rather than hiding his shame, speaking out partly, perhaps, to expose the results of Solevyev's regime, partly to confess himself, partly for posterity. He's soft-spoken, and never maudlin. He laughs when he relates the worst parts of his story, not because it is funny, not because he has grown indifferent to suffering, but because he is not indifferent, and it keeps him from breaking, because there is no other way to react. He laughs when he hates himself, he laughs when he is heartbroken, because it is the only way to keep going in such a terrible world, and he is - for no given reasons, for no grand defiant ideals, not out of hope for anything better, in fact with no particular conscious decision at all - determined to keep going for as long as he can.
Dmitrov is neither stupid, nor craven, nor weak for the way he deals with the juggernaut of Russia's military-abduction machine. In order to go from being a footsoldier to a unit commander in a world with an absolute surplus of fighting fit men, he must be smart, capable, stable, and brave in the face of battle and immediate danger. Although little courage is need to shepherd elderly civilians to their deaths during the early internal purges, the territories an expanding Russia consumed must certainly have put up what fight they could, especially with resources dwindling and nothing else to lose. He glosses over those years, but he does mention risking their lives.
His way of talking about his own situation and his commentary on Russia's societal changes and structure as a whole betray a somber, thoughtful mind. He's a cautious planner, skilled at logistics, and a good leader, who keeps his unit together and prevents them descending into madness and excessive barbarism, in spite of the fact that many of them by rights should be bugfuck nuts and not have access to firearms. Like an old-fashioned pirate captain, he is not a petty tyrant who keeps his men in fear: he leads them by demonstrating his own capabilities, by respecting them and their input, and ultimately appealing to their selfishness without granting it total free reign.
He's also very much not immune to selfishness himself, although in a world with so little, it's hard to begrudge him. "We take what we need, and then a little bit more," he says. He acknowledges that this is not any more ethical than when he was stealing for Solevyev and his lackeys, but he feels he deserves to keep what he takes. On some level he knows he has no right to it - but on another level he feels that he has earned it, that he deserves something in exchange for his years of grueling work and the pain of futile, gnawing guilt. It's hard to call him entitled, although he is, because it comes out of a place of deprivation and distrust, not arrogance. He has the same deep hunger for livable conditions that any human might, a completely accurate knowledge that they will not be provided and unlike so many in his world, he has what he decided, as a child, to acquire: the power, just enough, to take it, and to live another day.
He's capable of kindness, of empathy, and even of rash and desperate gestures, as when he spares the little Romanian girl, but these impulses break through the weight of his circumstances only under incredible pressure. Most of the time, he's in it for himself and his unit. He knows they are predators, and he doesn't want to prey on the weak wantonly, for no reason, or to provide Solevyev's coterie of tyrants with more luxury and power, but he believes that his own reason are enough. He is not justified, but he does not live in a just world.
Barge Reactions: Dmitrov is just going to be super overwhelmed by how much better the barge is from his world. There's enough to eat, there's always electrical power, unlimited fresh water, he doesn't have to kill or kidnap or intimidate anyone, there's no frigid Russian winter, no terrifying 'living living' skeleton key zombies eating everything in their path, no constant looking over his shoulder for Solevyev's retribution for desertion. He'll be really incredibly overwhelmed and grateful for the basic standard of living on the barge, but also resentful and bitter and low-key fucked up about it.
He'll have a rough time decompressing after decades of constant pillaging, he'll miss his unit mates badly, and he'll be really deeply perturbed by the death toll, but all the crazy fantasy stuff he will basically take in stride. It's bizarre, but it's not horrible. He has oranges. He'll deal with it.
[ETA] Petr will be returning WITH his previous barge memories. This mostly just means he will be familiar with the set-up of the ship. The only major emotional event that happened during his previous tenure was discovering that the girl who sparked his defection survived and continued to evade capture. While he hasn't really processed it yet at all, it serves as proof that human choices can make a difference in the face of overwhelming bleakness, and it will help spur him down the realization that these things matter. He's consequently probably about 4% redeemed. [/ETA]
[ETA 2] ....okay all that still holds. This time I'm going to have him initially arrive without his barge memories, just because I want to start him off on a clean slate with some new CR, and have him explore the ship instead of quietly resuming his kitchen shifts without talking to anyone, LMAO. Eventually he will get some scattered memories back of the swap event and his previous CR, but anything I've forgotten will stay hazy for him. [/End ETA 2]
Path to Redemption: Perhaps the most significant step for redemption has already been taken, when Petr decided to defect. He doesn't like killing, or stealing everything a community has, or handing over little girls to be raped and organ farmed or men to be worked to death. He has a lot of remorse and bitterness over doing all of those things. He's also not flatly in denial - he acknowledges some of the horrors of what he did. He does need to confront his responsibility for some of it more fully, but mostly he needs to realize that the terrible injustices of his life and lack of other options don't justify the way he continues to use the threat of force to take what he wants from struggling people. He deserves food and water and life as much as any person - but only as much as any other person. The world doesn't own him a debt, and it certainly doesn't owe him whatever he can take from others.
He needs to be more often the man who gave his food and gun away to a defenseless child, who fought back against the insurmountable horrors of his world rather than perpetuating them. He needs to realize that even though he is no longer serving the government that defined the architecture of the postmortal tragedy in Russia, no longer 'one of Solevyev's farm crops,' that he is still part of the system of unsustainable taking, and that he can't do it any more, not even for himself, not even a little bit, not even to survive and certainly not for a little bit of comfort. That will take a degree of selflessness that most people never have to cultivate, but he has the impulses within him, and he's been shoving them down all his life. With guidance, he can do it. And ultimately, to be anything better than a bully and a bandit, he will have to give up those justifications.
Deal:
History: Petr Dmitrov is born somewhere in Russia a few years after the invention of a cure for aging in 2019, into a world that hasn't quite figured out yet that it is already irreparably broken. The cure is ruinous. Humanity's population and consumption swells while civilizations destabilize. The destruction of the ecosystem accelerates exponentially, causing even more ruthless competition over the resources that remain, while billions sink into atrocious conditions and inescapable poverty.
In Russia, the president-in-name dictator-in-practice Boris Solevyev engineers a brutal, but (in the medium term) stable totalitarian expansionist state. Those who are too old or sick to contribute to the state, especially if they have been cured, are executed. The military swells with unaging soldiers. These soldiers are used to conquer and raid all over the former soviet bloc and beyond, acquiring resources to support the ever-expanding - but manageably expanding - army, which also controls the populace and prevents it from spiraling out of control. It is an absolutely ruthless, half-functional system, and Dmitrov is part of it.
When he is a young boy, in the early years of the cure's spread, soldiers come to his house and drag his grandmother away to be shot. This moment is devastating for him, but not galvanizing; it teaches him (correctly) the nature of his world. A few years later, when he is seventeen or eighteen, he is conscripted, and he joins the military willingly, taking the cure a few years later, at the peak of his physical capacity and health.
In his early years as a foot soldier, Dmitrov's missions primarily consisted of executing the old and the sick, initially by firing squad, and later by 'water purges' - bringing all of the undesirables to a single abandoned city with no water, and sealing them in to die of dehydration.
Over the next twenty years, Dmitrov rises through the ranks, until he is the leader of a large field operations unit. His exact rank and the size of the unit aren't known, but given the timescale of his career, the scale of the army, and the operations he describes, at the time of his defection I'm pegging him as a Major, commanding a company of around 150-200 men.
As the other global powers became distracted with their burgeoning domestic disasters, Russia began to expand unimpeded. Dmitrov's unit would range throughout the surrounding countries, with implicit orders. They would be given a target city, which they would descend on, taking water, food, fuel, and people. Men were sent back to slave labor farms in Russia, and women were taken to be used for sex and organ harvesting. Meanwhile, the rations issued to the military shrank - fewer food supplies, less vodka, and so on.
During one such operation, Dmitrov encounters a beautiful little girl in the center of her town, playing with a toy train car, who simply stares at him, and doesn't try to run, or scream, or even move. He is so horrified by the vision of this four-year-old child who had already given up on a life as anything other than seized chattel, that he finally breaks with his orders. He picks her up and carries her to the edge of the woods, gives her all his food and his pistol, and tells her to run. Over the next year, he talks to his unit, and they all agree together to prepare and then defect, becoming an RMU, or Rogue Military Unit.
Although they continue pillaging for resources, keeping what they take instead of sending it back to Russia, they do not abduct anyone and they manage, for at least two years, to avoid any more direct killing (although certainly others starve so they can eat), because they retain their guns and uniforms and the towns they descend on surrender to them.
In 2059, Dmitrov speaks to a Western journalist about his experience. Sometime between 2059 and 2079, the Arctic ice sheet is entirely melted, and America and Russia go to war over the resources in and around the Artic sea - a war which Russia wins, annexing large portions of Alaska and Canada. Although no longer working for the military, Dmitrov's unit is probably caught up in this conflict, given that the military is a rich supply target in itself, one of the only ones left. The cure does not protect against illness or injury; at some point, the chaos and violence that surrounds him eventually results in Dmitrov's death.
Sample Journal Entry: some test drive threads
Updated sample: TDM threads
Sample RP: He's been a lot of people, on the barge. A lot different kinds of soldiers - brave soldiers, cruel soldiers, tired soldiers, zealots and mercenaries and martyrs and survivors. But this life was different. This was a life, not just protracted, twilit youth full of death and scraping and more death, a reverse of Tithonus's curse.
He was old, as old as he really is, older, as old as he feels. He was a man with white hair and a cane. A grown daughter. Grandchildren. He could have had grandchildren, in another world -
Petr is not in the habit of destroying things when he is upset. Things are too easily lost, in his world, and very difficult to recover, and anyway it would have set a bad example for the men. He takes a knife, and the old bleached ulna of friend, stacked in a drawer for memory, for respect, in a time when there is no land to be wasted on laying the dead to rest, and whittles it carefully into pale bone flute. (There are more bones than wood, where he comes from.) He scrimshaws flowers down the length of it, tiny snowdrops from not-his-wife's garden. He blows off the dust, tries a note. It comes out reedy and eerie: exactly how you would expect a ghost to sing.
He plays for a long time; he is not sure whose ghost he means.
Updated sample: after a few tags in this is all prose
Special Notes:HE'S BACK DAMNIT THIRD TIME'S THE CHARM
User DW:
vibishanAIM/IM:
E-mail: pm please
Other Characters:
Character Name: Petr Dmitrov
Series: The Postmortal by Drew Magary
Age: Actual age 67; cure age/physical age 22.
From When?: Several years after his interview with Mascis; I'm headcanoning that he's killed during a skirmish on the outskirts of the Artic War.
Inmate/Warden: Inmate. Dmitrov has spent most of his life murdering and pillaging, first for the Russian army, and then for his own unit after their defection.
Abilities/Powers: He's a baseline human physiologically, except that he does not age, and he's been an active soldier for over forty years. His hand-to-hand skills are, by sheer dint of decades of practice, with no slowing down due to age, pretty phenomenal for a non-enhanced human. In the same vein, he's a crack shot and has a lot of useful survival and military skills. As he is an officer, he also has some command training, although how much other/college equivalent education he received for/with his commission in Solevyev's military is unknown, and probably less than a Russian Federation officer would receive today.
Personality: Dmitrov is a really extreme case of nature versus nurture. He is, or would have been, by nature, a really gentle person. He always uses the euphemisms first when he's talking about the atrocities he's perpetuated - 'resource collection' instead of pillaging, 'temporary use' instead of 'rape camps'. He doesn't want to say those things - to face them or to inflict them on his interlocutor. When he can afford to do it, he flinches; he softens the harshness of the truth. He's relieved by the advent of the water purges, because even though locking people up to die of dehydration is markedly crueler than shooting them, he says he was just relieved that he didn't have to watch them die, didn't have to do it directly. His mind, even after twenty years, shies away from the horrors rather than becoming entirely callous to them.
He's not a firebrand. He's not a man of great strength or principles, but he's also not simply a coward. He wanted to trust in his superiors and accept their justifications, because it made the things he was doing, things he hated, more bearable. He's trying to wrest a bearable existence from an unbearable world. He doesn't resist the terrible things he is called upon to do, but he also never really manages to emotionally accept them. He can shut down and ignore his empathy but never excise it. He is never molded into someone who enjoys cruelty, even though this is a very common developmental defense mechanism for people in similar circumstances.
He's hurt deeply as a child when his grandmother was ripped away from his family and disappeared, and he decides in a resigned, pragmatic way that he must be on the side with the power, but there's always an awareness of the cost of his decision. When he takes another old woman away from her own family, he completely knows that he is what he feared, that "I was the guy who stole my grandmother! That was me!" When he talks about his growing resentments of Solevyev's regime, he doesn't just talk about not getting his cut, he talks about "sacrificing our very souls"...and not getting a cut.
He has this very quintessentially Russian fatalism, this cynical acceptance, without despondency, of the world as a place where there is never enough, where there is never close to enough, where power is never used responsibly, because the police and the mafiya are the same except their clothes, where systems can never be relied upon, and where life, meager as it is, is still something to be trudged mulishly through, scrabbling for a little to hold onto, rather than despaired of. He doesn't disobey his orders as a younger man because life is still better than oblivion; but he also accepts his own mortality in a way that many of the cured do not. He knows he can't survive in the brutal, collapsing world forever. He strikes a balance between knowing that the punishment for his desertion will almost certainly be death, eventually, preferring to die free with something he has managed to take and keep for himself, and an unwillingness to sacrifice his life straight away.
He chooses to give the interview to Mascis, to face and discuss and bare his history to the world, rather than hiding his shame, speaking out partly, perhaps, to expose the results of Solevyev's regime, partly to confess himself, partly for posterity. He's soft-spoken, and never maudlin. He laughs when he relates the worst parts of his story, not because it is funny, not because he has grown indifferent to suffering, but because he is not indifferent, and it keeps him from breaking, because there is no other way to react. He laughs when he hates himself, he laughs when he is heartbroken, because it is the only way to keep going in such a terrible world, and he is - for no given reasons, for no grand defiant ideals, not out of hope for anything better, in fact with no particular conscious decision at all - determined to keep going for as long as he can.
Dmitrov is neither stupid, nor craven, nor weak for the way he deals with the juggernaut of Russia's military-abduction machine. In order to go from being a footsoldier to a unit commander in a world with an absolute surplus of fighting fit men, he must be smart, capable, stable, and brave in the face of battle and immediate danger. Although little courage is need to shepherd elderly civilians to their deaths during the early internal purges, the territories an expanding Russia consumed must certainly have put up what fight they could, especially with resources dwindling and nothing else to lose. He glosses over those years, but he does mention risking their lives.
His way of talking about his own situation and his commentary on Russia's societal changes and structure as a whole betray a somber, thoughtful mind. He's a cautious planner, skilled at logistics, and a good leader, who keeps his unit together and prevents them descending into madness and excessive barbarism, in spite of the fact that many of them by rights should be bugfuck nuts and not have access to firearms. Like an old-fashioned pirate captain, he is not a petty tyrant who keeps his men in fear: he leads them by demonstrating his own capabilities, by respecting them and their input, and ultimately appealing to their selfishness without granting it total free reign.
He's also very much not immune to selfishness himself, although in a world with so little, it's hard to begrudge him. "We take what we need, and then a little bit more," he says. He acknowledges that this is not any more ethical than when he was stealing for Solevyev and his lackeys, but he feels he deserves to keep what he takes. On some level he knows he has no right to it - but on another level he feels that he has earned it, that he deserves something in exchange for his years of grueling work and the pain of futile, gnawing guilt. It's hard to call him entitled, although he is, because it comes out of a place of deprivation and distrust, not arrogance. He has the same deep hunger for livable conditions that any human might, a completely accurate knowledge that they will not be provided and unlike so many in his world, he has what he decided, as a child, to acquire: the power, just enough, to take it, and to live another day.
He's capable of kindness, of empathy, and even of rash and desperate gestures, as when he spares the little Romanian girl, but these impulses break through the weight of his circumstances only under incredible pressure. Most of the time, he's in it for himself and his unit. He knows they are predators, and he doesn't want to prey on the weak wantonly, for no reason, or to provide Solevyev's coterie of tyrants with more luxury and power, but he believes that his own reason are enough. He is not justified, but he does not live in a just world.
Barge Reactions: Dmitrov is just going to be super overwhelmed by how much better the barge is from his world. There's enough to eat, there's always electrical power, unlimited fresh water, he doesn't have to kill or kidnap or intimidate anyone, there's no frigid Russian winter, no terrifying 'living living' skeleton key zombies eating everything in their path, no constant looking over his shoulder for Solevyev's retribution for desertion. He'll be really incredibly overwhelmed and grateful for the basic standard of living on the barge, but also resentful and bitter and low-key fucked up about it.
He'll have a rough time decompressing after decades of constant pillaging, he'll miss his unit mates badly, and he'll be really deeply perturbed by the death toll, but all the crazy fantasy stuff he will basically take in stride. It's bizarre, but it's not horrible. He has oranges. He'll deal with it.
[ETA] Petr will be returning WITH his previous barge memories. This mostly just means he will be familiar with the set-up of the ship. The only major emotional event that happened during his previous tenure was discovering that the girl who sparked his defection survived and continued to evade capture. While he hasn't really processed it yet at all, it serves as proof that human choices can make a difference in the face of overwhelming bleakness, and it will help spur him down the realization that these things matter. He's consequently probably about 4% redeemed. [/ETA]
[ETA 2] ....okay all that still holds. This time I'm going to have him initially arrive without his barge memories, just because I want to start him off on a clean slate with some new CR, and have him explore the ship instead of quietly resuming his kitchen shifts without talking to anyone, LMAO. Eventually he will get some scattered memories back of the swap event and his previous CR, but anything I've forgotten will stay hazy for him. [/End ETA 2]
Path to Redemption: Perhaps the most significant step for redemption has already been taken, when Petr decided to defect. He doesn't like killing, or stealing everything a community has, or handing over little girls to be raped and organ farmed or men to be worked to death. He has a lot of remorse and bitterness over doing all of those things. He's also not flatly in denial - he acknowledges some of the horrors of what he did. He does need to confront his responsibility for some of it more fully, but mostly he needs to realize that the terrible injustices of his life and lack of other options don't justify the way he continues to use the threat of force to take what he wants from struggling people. He deserves food and water and life as much as any person - but only as much as any other person. The world doesn't own him a debt, and it certainly doesn't owe him whatever he can take from others.
He needs to be more often the man who gave his food and gun away to a defenseless child, who fought back against the insurmountable horrors of his world rather than perpetuating them. He needs to realize that even though he is no longer serving the government that defined the architecture of the postmortal tragedy in Russia, no longer 'one of Solevyev's farm crops,' that he is still part of the system of unsustainable taking, and that he can't do it any more, not even for himself, not even a little bit, not even to survive and certainly not for a little bit of comfort. That will take a degree of selflessness that most people never have to cultivate, but he has the impulses within him, and he's been shoving them down all his life. With guidance, he can do it. And ultimately, to be anything better than a bully and a bandit, he will have to give up those justifications.
History: Petr Dmitrov is born somewhere in Russia a few years after the invention of a cure for aging in 2019, into a world that hasn't quite figured out yet that it is already irreparably broken. The cure is ruinous. Humanity's population and consumption swells while civilizations destabilize. The destruction of the ecosystem accelerates exponentially, causing even more ruthless competition over the resources that remain, while billions sink into atrocious conditions and inescapable poverty.
In Russia, the president-in-name dictator-in-practice Boris Solevyev engineers a brutal, but (in the medium term) stable totalitarian expansionist state. Those who are too old or sick to contribute to the state, especially if they have been cured, are executed. The military swells with unaging soldiers. These soldiers are used to conquer and raid all over the former soviet bloc and beyond, acquiring resources to support the ever-expanding - but manageably expanding - army, which also controls the populace and prevents it from spiraling out of control. It is an absolutely ruthless, half-functional system, and Dmitrov is part of it.
When he is a young boy, in the early years of the cure's spread, soldiers come to his house and drag his grandmother away to be shot. This moment is devastating for him, but not galvanizing; it teaches him (correctly) the nature of his world. A few years later, when he is seventeen or eighteen, he is conscripted, and he joins the military willingly, taking the cure a few years later, at the peak of his physical capacity and health.
In his early years as a foot soldier, Dmitrov's missions primarily consisted of executing the old and the sick, initially by firing squad, and later by 'water purges' - bringing all of the undesirables to a single abandoned city with no water, and sealing them in to die of dehydration.
Over the next twenty years, Dmitrov rises through the ranks, until he is the leader of a large field operations unit. His exact rank and the size of the unit aren't known, but given the timescale of his career, the scale of the army, and the operations he describes, at the time of his defection I'm pegging him as a Major, commanding a company of around 150-200 men.
As the other global powers became distracted with their burgeoning domestic disasters, Russia began to expand unimpeded. Dmitrov's unit would range throughout the surrounding countries, with implicit orders. They would be given a target city, which they would descend on, taking water, food, fuel, and people. Men were sent back to slave labor farms in Russia, and women were taken to be used for sex and organ harvesting. Meanwhile, the rations issued to the military shrank - fewer food supplies, less vodka, and so on.
During one such operation, Dmitrov encounters a beautiful little girl in the center of her town, playing with a toy train car, who simply stares at him, and doesn't try to run, or scream, or even move. He is so horrified by the vision of this four-year-old child who had already given up on a life as anything other than seized chattel, that he finally breaks with his orders. He picks her up and carries her to the edge of the woods, gives her all his food and his pistol, and tells her to run. Over the next year, he talks to his unit, and they all agree together to prepare and then defect, becoming an RMU, or Rogue Military Unit.
Although they continue pillaging for resources, keeping what they take instead of sending it back to Russia, they do not abduct anyone and they manage, for at least two years, to avoid any more direct killing (although certainly others starve so they can eat), because they retain their guns and uniforms and the towns they descend on surrender to them.
In 2059, Dmitrov speaks to a Western journalist about his experience. Sometime between 2059 and 2079, the Arctic ice sheet is entirely melted, and America and Russia go to war over the resources in and around the Artic sea - a war which Russia wins, annexing large portions of Alaska and Canada. Although no longer working for the military, Dmitrov's unit is probably caught up in this conflict, given that the military is a rich supply target in itself, one of the only ones left. The cure does not protect against illness or injury; at some point, the chaos and violence that surrounds him eventually results in Dmitrov's death.
Sample Journal Entry: some test drive threads
Updated sample: TDM threads
Sample RP: He's been a lot of people, on the barge. A lot different kinds of soldiers - brave soldiers, cruel soldiers, tired soldiers, zealots and mercenaries and martyrs and survivors. But this life was different. This was a life, not just protracted, twilit youth full of death and scraping and more death, a reverse of Tithonus's curse.
He was old, as old as he really is, older, as old as he feels. He was a man with white hair and a cane. A grown daughter. Grandchildren. He could have had grandchildren, in another world -
Petr is not in the habit of destroying things when he is upset. Things are too easily lost, in his world, and very difficult to recover, and anyway it would have set a bad example for the men. He takes a knife, and the old bleached ulna of friend, stacked in a drawer for memory, for respect, in a time when there is no land to be wasted on laying the dead to rest, and whittles it carefully into pale bone flute. (There are more bones than wood, where he comes from.) He scrimshaws flowers down the length of it, tiny snowdrops from not-his-wife's garden. He blows off the dust, tries a note. It comes out reedy and eerie: exactly how you would expect a ghost to sing.
He plays for a long time; he is not sure whose ghost he means.
Updated sample: after a few tags in this is all prose
Special Notes:
