Intro

Ryker was officially raised in Kiev. He raised into the life of a citizen of the ASU from an early age. His family were long-standing Soviet sympathizers, even during the dark ages of attempted capitalism. As a result of family and business interests, he lived in many cities around the world during his teenage years, including those in the southeast Asia, Korea, Thailand, South America, and Mexico. He currently acts as a covert agent of the CCD.

Physical description

He is 6’2″, muscular and broad shouldered. He has dirty blonde hair that’s thinning prematurely, and plain gray eyes. There are numerous scars from poorly healed wounds crossing his body, including from deep, non-sutured cuts and punctures, burns and abrasions, and most significantly, radiation burns that flashed most of his body. They are most significant on one side of his face, and as a result one eye is murky with partial-blindness. The burn scars cover the same side of his chest, back, arm, hip and thigh. Prior to the disfiguring wounds, he was considered handsome.

Personality

Ryker is a sexist, racist asshole. He has a deeply burned hatred of women and foreigners. He was married for a short time, but he abused the woman that loved him despite his attraction and connection with her. She was killed by Custody agents to obliterate his identity while he was detained in the United States. He had no children and if he did, he would ignore their existence.

He’s arrogant, but for good cause. He is not a coward, but deeply self-preserving. He will leave a fight if he is poorly positioned to win it. He does not like to take great risks without confidence in his own success. He’s not sadistic, but will put people in their place for disrespecting him.

Career

He joined the ASU army at 18. He worked his way through the ranks, distinguishing himself with a certain set of morally ambiguous skills. He was recruited to Custody intelligence and trained to specifically carry out covert, counter-terrorist missions abroad according to Custody standards. By his late twenties, he had a long list of missions under his belt, including assassinations in nations key to Custody interest: China, Australia, Brazil and the United States. He had been with the Zenith Advanced Reliancers (ZARS) for about 5 years before being sent to Dayton.

Dayton

The Reliancers are under the direct command of the Ascendancy. Their missions directly approved or ordered from him. Which was why a 4-person ZARS team was sent to Dayton, Ohio in the days before the Ascendancy arrived for an energy summit. Their mission was to destabilize the nuclear power plant outside the city in a bid to prove nuclear energy was a dangerous, ageing power source.

Zars team

• Team leader – Unnamed, former KGB from the days before the ASU, monitored communication from the summit and Ascendancy’s orders with the team inside the plan.
• Ryker – former army, mechanical destabilization of the cooling system.
• Johann Ek – former SPETS, technological destabilization of the command center.
• Massimo Cocci – former White Knights, running firearms, ammunition, extraction and communication
• Wioletta Jasinka – former GROM with three doctoral degrees served as communications and nuclear advisor.

Ryker and his team were inside the plant core when the Ascendancy’s channeling incited a complete meltdown. Ryker was left behind, caught in the surge of radiation. His power manifested for the first time while within, but he could only partially save himself. He was the only survivor found on site, identified as foreign intelligence, and sent to prison without a trial. The Custody denied his existence and Ryker’s hope of a trade was obliterated. He spent almost a year in San Quentin Military Prison Complex in Marin County, California, USA.

Channeling

His block for channeling developed while imprisoned, however he realized that the power only manifested while in extreme pain. Therefore, he frequently sought altercations to keep his skills honed and practice the art of channeling. These disturbances typically landed him in solitary confinement, something he desired in order to be left alone. It was during such times that he began to self-inflict wounds, cuts, and other means of bodily harm in order to wield the power. Alone, in pain and darkness, he practiced.

He is skilled in the making of weapons from the one power and compulsion. His block is that he must be in active pain to channel.

Associates

After he escaped from San Quentin, he accessed the warden’s computer system to register himself as a channeler, knowing that the CID and other identity would flag the intelligence agencies of his existence and survival. He journeyed to Cape Town by way of Mexico, then entered Custody Dominance V, a territory he was familiar with, and made contact with the appropriate agencies in the area. From there, he was airlifted to Moscow, where on the tarmac, Ascendancy himself welcomed him home with a promotion to Commander and a generous expense tab

Since that time, he has stayed in Moscow proper, and expected to stay there. His work was to destabilize organized crime in the city in order to gain Custody power over such units.

• Amengual cartel – He acted as a middle man to deliver drugs into the Moscow market on behalf of the cartel.
• The Yakuza – Acting on behalf of a third party, he made contact with the Yakuza in order to broker an arm’s deal.
• The Syndicate – This activity with the Yakuza was noticed by the Syndicate, especially Yun Kao, where they thought to recruit him to deliver mutually beneficial deals between the two crime bosses. Furthermore, the Syndicate was to distribute the goods delivered by the Amengual cartel.

Cycle of rebirths