"There come such times, it is easier to know your path in the Night than in the city."

Player: Kolotil

Character Name: Kolotil (Kolya) Danilovich

Age: 52

Sex: Male

Species: Purebred Borzoi

Height/Weight: 6' 7", 180 lbs

Social Status: Outer Class (Kossak)

Physical Description: Kolotil is a tall, white-pelted canine with an extraordinarily long and slender muzzle and short but floppy ears. The majority of his visible pelt is short and fine as white velvet, but at his ears and the nape of his neck it grows into long, silky curls that fall in natural ringlets about his throat. Kolya is an albino, pink-nosed and red-eyed. With his ruby eyes, pale fur, and the gaunt, emaciated look his naturally slender, bony form has taken on over decades of putty-eating, he presents a rather ghostly, wraith-like appearance. His clothing is a haggard, threadbare commingling of traditional Kossak garb and modern practicality: felted combat boots and chipped ceramet shin armor strapped over quilted, stained pants and a heavy, time-worn cherkeska of a light French grey hue, its cartridge loops across his chest long empty and sagging. The old shashka and kindzhal that hang from a web belt are both plainly made and plainly old, early Species-War munitions grade with their grips replaced with slabs of worn, polished bone. Over the Kossak longcoat and largely concealing it is thrown a stain-spattered military armored greatcoat lined with ragged synthwool, often buttoned... Tradition can only demand so much singling yourself out for those who hunt you. Occasionally a battered old fur papakha hat is crumpled down over his ears when the cold becomes too much or he is 'going out' (to the Nightlands). A long and wide scarf handwoven of some kind of Night-creature wool in pale greys and blues drapes around his shoulders. He is an old hunter and comports himself as such, interspersing long periods of intensely patient stillness and consideration with smooth, gracefully pre-determined movements before gliding back again into stillness. His voice is coarse and gravelly from too many years out in the Night and too many years drinking harsh alcohol.

Background: The voisko roaming the Night had heard of the new city, of course. There were stories from the few travellers they met, and the traders who came and went between the Kossak nation-clan and the Colonies could not fail to bring back legends of bravery and foolishness. It was pure chance that the new city was so near to the Semiryek voisko. It was pure chance that the skyship fell that night, so near to their camp on the dark tundra. It was not chance that made their hetman take in the refugees of the slow-fallen transport, and set the voisko's path to the new city where the travellers had been bound. The refugees were a peculiar group to voisko eyes; species of many sorts travelling together in peace with each other and with hope of peace for all. Perhaps it was foolishness, but their courage stirred many of the hearts of the People, and there was no shortage of volunteers to accompany the helpless and weak colony-dwellers to the new city. The rada was united, the decision was made, and the whole of the voisko stirred itself into motion across the frozen wastes, making camp every so often to rest, to sing, to celebrate their hunts.
Kolya was a young man at that time, but he had seen one other city before, guarding and accompanying the envoys and traders who went to Argent, where the other canids not of the People stayed. For his wife and his young son, Einheit was a first.
Wary as they were, even bringing rescued refugees, the voisko was welcomed to the new city, and for a little time, celebration became more important than work. Somehow, without the rada ever approving it, the Semiryek voisko became a part of the new city. The Kossaks laughed and hunted the Night around, then returned to the tall fortress walls of Einheit and worked alongside the timid but daring folk who were forming a new place, and a new life, within the ancient walls. There were trials and misunderstandings, and the uneasy peace made when other Kossak voiskos made their way to Einheit. Frey himself addressed the hetmen of each voisko, forged a brittle bridge of peace between them over the gulf of untold centuries of feuding. There was a promise of a better world, here, but to grasp it, old hatreds had to be let go. The elders of the rada nodded sagely, pleased with the wisdom this cityborn doctor held.
For three years, the voiskos put down roots; tents became shacks became cleared holdings in some of the great buildings of the city. Just when things were looking brightest and the foretold future was nearly at their fingertips, the great peacemaker was killed, shot down before the very people he had freed and brought together.
The outskirts of the city erupted in war, and the voisko fought as hard and brutally as any, daring to go out in the Night and stalk the enemy through the cold and dark, hunting as they had always hunted. The initial attacks were pushed back, and things settled into unease as the Ministry took hold.
Unification didn't settle well with proud nomads who counted allegiance by bloodline and saw themselves as noble and literally a breed apart from the city dwellers. The voiskos had never really been a part of the new city's economy, but it disgruntled them to be more and more turned away from aiding in the rebuilding of the damaged city, and it wasn't long before they were shifted, moved, pressured cleverly into less desireable areas...Almost ghettos.
The voiskos held to their traditions, becoming more and more apart from the city that sheltered them. Kolya taught his son to hunt the Night, outside the city, as his father had taught him to hunt in the great, dark wastes. Some Kossak families trickled back out into the darkness, living off the land again and disassociating themselves with the ongoing war. About a decade after the death of Frey, one of the voiskos began to prepare to move out its entire Kossak nation. Mistrust had replaced the glory of achievement, and hope had withered under years of bombardment and steadily increasing regulation. When several terrorist bombings took place near the Toride just as the purebred nation-clan was beginning to move out, retribution was swift, sure, and largely escaped the notice of the citizens of Einheit who had begun to distance themselves from the Kossak ghettos. Ministry representatives were quick to simultaneously lay blame upon the shattered voisko and to approach the remaining nation-clan's hetmen and assure them that they were not suspect. Not suspect, but required to cooperate in full with the Ministry.
Communication was lost with Kossak families outside the city. More and more of those who went out to hunt simply never came back. The rada fractured. Somehow medical treatment never seemed to be available when disease swept through the ghettos. Somehow there was never enough food to keep anyone healthy. The Ministry played upon the ancient hatreds and feuds between the voiskos, until tiny sparks of civil war broke out within the ghettos, family against family. In the end, the Ministry really didn't have to work terribly hard to reduce the Kossak nation-clans to powerlessness, the voiskos own tribalism did it for them. Ministry police actions accounted for many of those who survived...including Kolya's wife, Terynka, and his son, Grigori, and his son's wife, Annushka. Kolya crawled into a bottle, only coming out to Nighthunt long enough to provide for another week of drinking. It was 21 ECE.
Save for a few visits to old friends, Kolya left the voisko, and the ghetto. He never ate the meat he hunted for, sustaining himself on putty while the money the syndicate mafiyatchiki paid him for his meat went to buying more to drink. When the traps were empty and there was no meat for money or drink, he made a horrid concoction from certain molds and putty-dissolved water, left it to ferment in warm, dark places. It was foul, but so was life. He wasted away to the point that what few friends he had remaining took to referring to him as 'Goldnyi Dukh'...The hungry ghost.
In truth, his story should have ended there.
A few months ago, a young Kossak boy found him where he was asleep in an Undercity alley and managed to bully and press him into coming with him to see the hetman of the Semiryeks, Kolya's voisko...The father of his dead wife. The old man was dying, and had some things to tell him.
First, there was no more Semiryek voisko. There were no Tareks, there were no Zaporozyi. There were no longer enough Kossaks in the city to think of themselves as separate voiskos, the few hetman and few elders left had agreed. They were Kossaks, and they were only Kossaks, and did they outlive this infernal city they would all be Kossaks together, undivided.
Second, that the loss of Kolya's wife did not excuse his duty to other Kossaks, nor to the world and the people of it. The world was in a horrible state, but getting drunk was not going to make it better.
Third, that he was giving Kolya a gift he had meant to pass on to his daughter Terynka. That it might help him, but even if it did not, it was his duty to guard it and to keep it, and to pass it on to other Kossaks when it became necessary. It was one of very few left in the world, and he must guard it with his life.
It was an ancient thing, an Eastern Orthodox bible.
The request of a dying man carries weight in nearly any culture. Kolya tucked the small book into a pocket beneath his cherkeska. It was very little weight to carry to show respect. It was outlawed, yes, but so was he, and so was every other Kossak. He could only be killed the one time, and in truth he was resigned that death was likely to come to him sooner, rather than later.
It didn't even occur to him to read it for several weeks. It was weeks after that before he read something that struck close enough to his heart to make him stop and think.
Hunting, or drinking, or wandering the run-down ways of the Undercity, an old man has plenty of time to think. He doesn't have religion, at least not yet...But he carries it with him, and he considers it. Among the poor, the ruined, the outcast, the helpless...Among the prey and their predators...The words of a lamb a few millenia gone find strange opportunities to link themselves to the hopelessness he sees before him.
Kolotil spends a little over half of his time out in the Nightlands, often heading out for weeks at a time to set his trap-lines and returning, dragging a bone-rib tobaggan heavy with Zaitsa and other meat.

Personality: Kolya presents a gruff and cynical, hardbitten front that breaks down under too much scrutiny to reveal a compassionate, rather tender-hearted soul. He has spent several years believing he had lost everything. He is beginning to doubt the part of himself that believes that hope is for fools and children. As much as he would like to think of himself as a loner, and apart from the City-born, he lived too long as part of a tightly knit family/tribe, and cannot resist trying to find people to be around in the City...The Night outside provides more than enough alone-time.


Weapons/Equipment:

- an old rifle cached out in the Nightlands that he _never_ brings into the city: 'Svetlana' is a 25mm anti-tank rifle, not dissimilar to a PTRS in overall design but crafted out of light ceramics, ceramets and titanium. It is magazine fed from a 3-round magazine and has a jacket with heating/cooling tubes runs along the fluted barrel to maintain a consistent 'first shot' temperature and mask some of the heat generated by firing. It would not penetrate a modern Ministry armored vehicle, but would through-penetrate practically any infantry-wearable armor (powered suits would have some chance of withstanding it). He has only a limited amount of ammunition for this beast and uses it only as a 'last ditch defense' against really big Nightlands predators. His actual hunting is done using leg-jaw traps and a spontoon to make the kill.
- sword and kindzhal
- an old pair of passive IR goggles
- an even older PDA with a sort of a GPS system that relies upon sensing the location of sky-furnaces
- A military greatcoat. The armorweave in it would be a joke to White weapons, but _might_ protect him against small arms from half a century ago or from blades. More importantly to a hunter in the nightlands, chemical treatments mask and absorb much of his bodyheat, lowering his infrared profile and storing accumulated heat for several hours. It can be triggered to bleed accumulated heat from the inner surface of the coat, either to keep one warm, or to 'dump' the chemical heat capacitance, again requiring a few hours to discharge unless buried in snow or some other extremely cold environment...Not a terribly unusual piece of equipment for a soldier or a hunter in the Night.
The armor on his boots and gauntlets are predominantly Kossak-made ceramics patched out with bits from the armor of other colonies.
Kolotil has many 'survival caches' scattered through the Nightlands, containing food, warm blankets, spare knives, water, chemical warmers, etc. (Some of them also have separate caches nearby with a handful of his remaining ammunition for Svetlana.)