Vlad Ionescu

[Glorybound19D]

Player Nickname: Frank`Davis

Name: Vlad Mihail Ionescu
Codename: N/A
Age: 113 (appears 33)
Date of Birth: March 17th, 1898

Height: 6'
Weight: 182 lbs
Hair Color: Black
Eye Color: Blue
Place of Origin: Bucharest, Romania
Nationality/Race: Romanian/White
Classification: Mutant

Status: Other
Occupation: Self-employed, Dacia Military Protection Corporation

Personality Profile: Vlad is a consummate professional, but he is not an emotionless robot. Despite years of working as a member of the KGB and Securitate, he maintains a generally positive, if not cautious, outlook on life. His positive attitude is tempered by decades spent in the middle of war and military conflict, and hides a much larger moral issue with the tasks that he has carried out throughout his career. He is very guarded about this issue, and he does not discuss it with anyone.

Physical Description:
http://i301.photobucket.com/albums/nn59 ... yrne-4.jpg
---------------------------------

Powerset:

Ability One: Shadow Walking - Simply, Vlad is able to walk in and out of shadows. The range of this ability is not known exactly, though the farthest that Vlad has attempted to move in this fashion is a mile. Moving through limbo is much faster than travelling by foot, but it still takes an amount of time; as an example, Vlad can run a mile in 7 minutes, but he can travel that same distance through limbo in 4 minutes.

Ability Two: Regeneration - Vlad's ability to regenerate tissue is remarkable. He can heal very quickly from a large variety of injuries with minimal scarring. As a result, he ages much more slowly than a human being.

Drawbacks & Weaknesses:
In order to travel from one shadow to another, Vlad must have access to a shadow of appropriate size on the other end. Similar to a physical doorway, if an area of shadows or darkness is not large enough for him to move through, he will be unable to enter or exit through it. If he enters limbo and no appropriate shadows are available for him to exit, he will become trapped until an exit can be found. However, due to the nature of limbo and its altered perception of time, he may succumb to insanity if trapped for too long.

While able to recover from most injuries, Vlad is still mortal. If he suffers serious damage that he could theoretically repair, such as multiple gunshot wounds or multiple lacerations, he enters a comatose state while his body attempts to repair the damage. In this state he can be kept alive so long as he is provided with oxygen and blood to his brain. However, if he is unable to recieve such medical treatment within an hour of suffering these injuries, he will die.

Projected Power Growth & Development: Vlad's powers have developed as much as they are going to. Barring genetic, physical, or mystical manipulation, his powers will not improve or decrease.

Skills:
Having spent more than half a century as a soldier and KGB operative, Vlad has a diverse range of useful skills. He can speak several languages, including English, converstionally. His adaptational training rivals any special forces operators today; he can improvise explosives, hot-wire and drive multiple vehicles, set up ambushes and other tactical situations when pursuing a target or losing pursuers, and a myriad of other skills. His only weakness is electronics. While he has a very good working knowledge of electrical systems, he is less proficient at electronic warfare and sabotage, and generally dislikes using computers.

Vlad is proficient in the use of a number of firearms, from Soviet made rifles and pistols to their American counterparts. He is a marksman with an assault rifle, and while he is an able sharpshooter, he prefers closer range engagements. He is very skilled at hand-to-hand combat, and is extremely dangerous with a knife.

Aside from his military training, Vlad is a successful businessman with an eye on efficiency and productivity.

Background: Vlad was born to Teodor and Florina Ionescu, a middle class family, at the turn of the 20th century in Bucharest, Romania. Few records remain concerning who his parents were or what they did, but it is clear they had some wealth and lived comfortably. Vlad was the third of five children, and the first boy. From what records are available, he was academically bright and excelled in political science and history.

Official records for Vlad Ionescu start in 1916, when he enlisted in the Romanian army and fought in World War I. He rose rapidly as an enlisted soldier and was comissioned as an officer by the end of the war. It is noted in a number of correspondences from his commanders that he seems to have a knack for surviving grievous injuries and miraculously manuevering around enemy forces, but little else is mentioned concerning his mutations.

After the war, he pursued further education and was granted a position as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Bucharest. He showed promise as a teacher and was well-liked by many of the staff there, showing great potential for tenure. He was also remarked as looking very young, despite his growing age. The professor that he worked under wrote that "despite being only six years my junior, he looks as young as the students in my undergraduate classes." His career continued modestly, but well, until World War II.

In the early part of Romania's involvement in World War II, he distanced himself from Ion Antonescu and the National Legionary State, believing a dictatorial, Nazi-puppet state to be the antithesis of a unified and prosperous Romanian country, which he had felt strongly about since his childhood. When the Soviets assisted King Michael I to overthrow Antonescu, he once again fought to liberate his country with the Soviets, joining their campaign into Germany. He was one of the first Red Army soldiers to set foot into Berlin, and he recieved several commendations that were uncommon for a non-Russian at the time.

His particular skills were noticed by the KGB in Moscow, and he was lauded as a hero and ordered to come to the USSR. It was quickly discovered that he was, in fact, a mutant. After being confirmed as a member of the Communist Party and a soldier in the Red Army, he was drafted by the KGB for use as a political investigator. From 1947 to 1954, he was officially a tactical liason for the Red Army to the KGB, though in reality he investigated dissent in Russia and the Warsaw Pact nations, eliminating targets of interest in order to solidify the Soviet Union's power over its satellite states.

In 1955, Vlad was selected for the Soviet super soldier program (the same program which would produce Omega Red). Lacking the necessary medical and technical expertise to graft the newly crafted metal alloy carbondanium to Vlad's skeleton, the decision was made instead to focus on intensive training to determine the extent of his mutation and the best way to significantly improve his control over it. To this end, he was subjected to the harshest methods of torture Soviet scientists could devise. Though the process left him with horrific memories, it proved invaluable; his body recovered from each torture more robustly than the previous. During this time, he also honed his technique for moving through shadows, refining the technique into a science.

He recieved commendation from Premier Nikita Khrushchev himself, and went back into the service of the KGB. His new task was to put down any attempt by local movements or Western agencies to overthrow Communist governments around the world. Though the CIA maintained a file on him, referred to as codename Hector, they lacked susbtantial intelligence on his whereabouts, habits, and even his appearance. He was ranked amongst the most susbstantial threats to national security and containment abroad by the CIA, and he was considered a high priority target during the majority of the Cold War.

During the 1960's, he travelled extensively through Western Europe, Asia, and Cuba, assisting Communist governments as a military advisor and terminating resistance movements, as well as working parallel to agents from the newly formed Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, in tracking down Nazi war criminals that had escaped persecution. From 1968 to 1973 he was assigned with a group of military advisors in Vietnam, to train Viet Cong guerillas and conduct unconventional warfare against the U.S. presence. In this capacity he was highly successful; according to official KGB reports, he was personally responsible for more than 200 enemy kills.

After returning from Vietnam, he requested to operate in Romania, his home country. This request was granted by the KGB, under order from Brezhnev, and Vlad returned to Romania to a private ceremony, where he met and shook hands with General Secretary Nicolae Ceausescu. He was placed in an advisory position to the Securitate, where he continued his work as an enforcer. Up to this point, he had viewed the work he had conducted to uphold Communism as a necessary evil to maintain the greater good. He considered the endemic corruption he saw in many of the nascent democracies in Europe and the dictatorships propped up by the United States in Asia and South America as symptomps of a system that sought its own enrichment, rather than the enrichment of its people. However, working with the Securitate to round up and execute his own countrymen, for wanting the freedom to choose their own destiny, disturbed him deeply. It was at this point that he secretly turned on the Ceausescu regime.

By 1989, Vlad had become severely disillusioned with the Ceausescu government, feeling that it had become inheritor to Stalin's Russian legacy and failed to protect the Romanian people, and began to actively subvert it. His skills in unconventional warfare, espionage, and subversion far exceeded the Securitate's ability to hunt him down, and he helped set in motion the riots that would result in the December Revolution and the overthrow of Communist government.

Following the revolution, Vlad embraced the free market economy rapidly developing in the Eastern Bloc and former Soviet Union. Having been a highly-paid operative for the KGB for decades and an equally invested member of the Securitate for more than 10 years, he had amassed a small fortune, which he used to retire from so-called civil service. As a democratic Romania formed itself from the ruins of the Communist regime, he tired of sitting around and not doing anything, so initially invested in the new political landscape. His reputation in the Securitate amongst former members of the Party weilded significant respect, if not outright fear, and he quickly made some friends in high places, including Traian Basescu, who would later be elected twice as the President.

Though he kept his motivations private, he maintained his connections to prevent another authoritarian government from taking hold of Romania again. He was not actively engaged in politics beyond some social interaction. Instead, in 2000, he created the Dacian Military Protection Corporation (DMPC) as a way to maintain his wealth and occupy himself; he had come to the realization that he wasn't ready for retirement. Growth was slow, with only three hires in the course of the first year. With the terrorist attack in New York City on September 11th, 2001, Vlad secured a contract with the Romanian military in anticipation of assistance to American forces invading Afghanistan. His company hired more than a dozen soldiers at the end of their first enlistment, and DMPC deployed to Afghanistan with the Romanian armed forces and other NATO soldiers in assistance to the US mission. Along with the traditional function of providing additional force to the military units in Afghanistan, DMPC expanded into Iraq and began providing VIP protection services as well as site security for new military construction.

Over the next 10 years, DMPC grew in size and prosperity, profiting from its contracts within the Romanian government and nascent defense industry. Vlad maintained control over the executive functions of the company as the president and CEO, as well as the commander of Alpha Team, the original group which he'd founded the company with. Aside from their military mission, Vlad recruited a handful of intelligence officers from both the Romanian Army and other armed forces, including the US. This, combined with his existing contacts, gave him significant intelligence assets in the area, which he shared with the CIA and the US Army. By the end of 2010, with Romanian forces pulling out of Iraq and significantly reducing their commitment in Afghanistan, Vlad shifted his mission almost exclusively to site and personal protection, as well as maintaining his intelligence structure. He continues to assist US intelliegence services in the region, granting him a small measure of professional courtesy from the agency.

Criminal Record: Technically he does not have a criminal record. His operations as a member of the KGB and Securitate remain highly classified to this day.

Quirks, Extras, Random Character Facts:
--------------------------------------------------------------
I'm not sure where I want to take Vlad, though I do want to use him as a springboard to some storyline in the future and as a playable character making occasional appearance in Salem, MA. Originally he was a character from a different room, and when Narcisa was posted, I thought it might be neat to bring him here and relate the two, seeing as they have the same last name.

[Goldbolt]

After another discussion we, once again, cannot with good conscious approve this character. His ties to the military and his skill-set still make him a person that does not mesh with the playing continuity. There is also a bit of hesitation concerning the fact that you've got no general path for this character and admit that the only reason you've brought him here was because he shared a last name with someone else. We find it difficult to see how this character can work to bring group role-play to the room. However, if you would like to use this character in a side chan we certainly would not stop you.