"Nikolai"

Concept: Master of disguise
AKA: As the man has passed into espionage legend, he has garnered a number of nicknames, most notably, The Chameleon, And Mr. Can’t Miss

Desc: Brown eyes, brown hair, average build. The musculature of a martial artist.

History: “Nikolai” was a spook. A pretty good one too. He found that he excelled in the field of disguise and impersonation. He had some talent as a natural mimic and he put that to work for him. If he could procure an audio sample of the person he was impersonating, he could many time ape their speech patterns well enough to fool those who knew them for short to middling long intervals. He’s quite adept at dialects too.
Like many former KGB operatives, he is very disciplined and when the USSR came apart he went private and salted away a decent amount of cash for himself. Then he simply disappeared.
“Nikolai” is essentially retired. He doesn’t take on contracts anymore unless they are particularly fat or offer an interesting challenge to him. In which case, he’ll often go to the extent of telling the target that he is coming for him and give the target a time when he is going to meet his maker. This often has the effect of making the target do terribly stupid things out of desperation. 
   Often, if Nikolai is on a job, he’ll take on the identity of someone close to the victim and wait for the proper time to strike. He can be very patient when he has to be.

Attitude: I don’t bother judging people. I leave that to others. However, when the money is right. I’ll go after someone. Invariably I see something about them in doing my research that makes it okay for me to erase them. if you’re IN this world, you’ve done something terrible...That’s not really up for debate.

Skills: Quite a bit of points salted into languages. Intellectually, he’s fairly strong and a sharp student of people. Socially, he’s also pretty strong with a bit of emphasis on Manipulation. Physically, he’s not terribly strong. But that’s because by the time you know it’s him and that you’re under attack, you look down and realize you’ve already got two knives sticking out of you. He may have some points salted away into some kind of gunfighting/sniping fighting style as well. He’s got a decent spread of dots in academics and various other skills that indicate the kind of life lived traveling all over. He has plenty of dots in Crafts (Specialty: make-up) and expression(special: improv/acting)  

Gear: He has an old beat-up steamer trunk that doubles as his make-up workshop it can be unpacked and he can be working on a project in ten minutes. it can be re-packed in about the same amount of time. There is also a non-trivial amount of plastique in the bottom of the case, in case he needs to leave it behind for any reason.  His everyday carry involves a smartphone and an attache case which is home to an SMG, A silenced pistol, A garrote, and 3 sets of combat knives. He tends to wear a layer of thin kevlar underneath whatever else he might have on.

Home: In addition whatever house he has decided to hang his hat in, he’ll have a gulf stream mobile home that he can be on the road within under 6 minutes. This gulf stream is loaded with cash, salable items, and bogus papers. just in case, he needs to leave the country in a hurry. he keeps a satellite phone in there and a very heavily encrypted laptop. Just in case of a rainy day.

Circle: As I mentioned, Nikolai is retired from the game, but it does mean he can do now what he always wanted to do. And so, he’ll find himself doing community theater and doing it fairly damn well. Most of his friends know him this way. The people who truly know him know him from his espionage days and they know that he can be prepared, tricky as fuck, and ruthless as a top rated assassin can be.

Story Uses:
“Who am I? I’m just a man who is in his element and if you want to live through this, you’ll do what I am telling you.”
Nikolai makes for an unlikely hero. He’s done bad things. Taken lives and so on. But In the right circumstances, he might turn around and out-clever the bad people who might be causing you some trouble. He doesn’t rattle easily and he’s not one to fog up in the middle of a conflict.

“Kid. I have to hand it to you, You made this one interesting. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got money to collect....”
On the other hand, You might come up against Nikolai. He IS an espionage legend for a reason. Mainly because he never takes any of it personally. He’s not invested in revenge or anything that might put him off balance emotionally. He leaves that to other people. Targets, and clients usually. he plans meticulously and can improvise on a moments notice. He’s tough to come up against. The KGB made sure of it.

Connections:
*Dr. Dennis McMurtry (They used to tangle back in the old days. Nikolai has one habit that occasionally has given him away, He tends to be fidgety with his hands. If there is anyone who could spot Nikolai while he is in disguise, it's dennis.)
* Aldous Church ( Each has the other in their professional rolodex. Each rarely has need of the other based on their respective specialties.)
* Clarinda Hale  (Used to know Clarinda's father, thinks of himself as a kind of uncle. Has taken a number of her language classes in various guises.)

Slocumb's Horseshoe Motor-lodge

Every town has one. PC town is no different.

There’s always one place in town where people get up to mischief. The sort of place where drug deals go on. Marriages are...adulterated. and occasionally people get shot. Every place I have ever lived has a spot like this. Mostly, they are motels.

Martin bought Old man Slocumb out. Martin was flush and bought into the business, and the old man wanted out so he let himself be bought out cheap. Martin didn’t care about a lot of the things that went on in and around the Motorlodge as long as it didn’t really hurt the profits. And for the most part, it didn’t. People need rundown seedy motels for many different reasons that have nothing to do with lodging.

Then Martin passed away and his sister Gail inherited the place and she is NOT HAVING IT. Gail is a former marine and is not interested in her property being a roosting place for drug deals and other illegal activities. (Although she’s much softer on the prostitutes for various reasons.)

The layout:

There is a central building that stands in the middle of the property. The Pool is on the back side of the central building. The rest of the place wraps around the central building much like a horseshoe shape. The laundry/housekeeping/physical plant area take up part of the bend on the back side. A chain link fence runs all the wall around the back side of the property and the parking lot opens onto the street in only two places. All of the units face inward toward the central building. There are two levels, the street level, and the upper level. Ice machines and vending are located at the ends of the horseshoe and are in a brick alcove that is sheltered from the elements. An ice machine and additional vending machines are on the back side of the central building facing the pool. There is precious little shelter there though.  An old pay phone is on the wall next to the vending machines and it sees a surprising amount of traffic.

The rooms have an extremely low pile dark green carpeting That scrubby kind that can actually give you pretty bad rug burn and a light beige wallpaper. All the art is bolted to the walls. The TV’s are fairly old but DO have cable and they’ve been gimmicked so that their volume only goes so high. The walls are on the thin side, so they have to. The beds are clean but a bit lumpy and the AC units only seem to have three speeds 1) Convection oven, 2) Jack London Novel, and Off.  The pressure in the showers is pretty good. Each room has a mini-fridge and a small microwave and coffee maker. there’s wifi too but it’s not terribly good or fast. the firewall software is also pretty crap but truthfully, War-dialing is probably the least serious crime that EVER goes on here.

There’s a flying “J” across the road which is a chain for those who are unfamiliar, of large truck stops. Like a speedway on steroids. Mostly for 16 wheelers and so forth. Large cab big rigs tend to park over there and Gail has created a short stay rate for truckers who simply want a shower. Local prostitutes, known in trucker parlance as “Lot lizards” also take advantage of the short stay rates. The Flying “J” also has a pretty good sandwich shop inside. Gail gets a lot of her sustenance there. She’s not much for sweets and the empty calories of gas station snacks and candy.

Gail keeps an apartment directly above the central building and on the occasions when someone is out in the parking lot making some kind of ruckus, she has been known to come out in her PJ’s with a loaded lever action shotgun. She’s pretty good with that gun as some of the local dealers have learned so a lot of the time they keep everything to a dull roar. A lot of the deals that take place around here are simply two cars pull in together and the deal happens in seconds and off they go.  Hundreds of transactions happen like this in a week.

The spiritual landscape:

First: let’s talk about the dead people. there are a few of them Martin is one, congestive heart failure caught up to him one night while he was minding the desk by himself. Every once in a while Gail thinks she’s seen him out of the corner of her eye puttering around at the desk. Martin doesn’t know he’s dead and is pleasantly surprised each time he encounters his sister.

Izzy Washington got himself gunned down in the parking lot some years ago. He knows he’s dead and now most of the anchors holding him here are resolved, more or less. But for some reason, probably fear, he’s afraid to let go and move on.

Daryl turns up nearly every full moon. Daryl’s pretty sad. He found out his girl was cheating on him with his best friend and stabbed them both to death before blowing his own head off.  It used to be that same scene would play itself out about once a month. it used to scare the socks off the odd person who despite warnings would room in 106.  It turned the room into an abattoir until the blood would fade away in the daylight.  Finally, a group of ghost hunters came around and laid Paco and Trina to rest, but Daryl is either stubborn or dumb as hell and won’t move on.

    There is a slight undertow of negative chi that runs through this place, not like a full-blown ley line of it or anything crazy like that. But occasional murder and violence spirits turn up here and when they do, disagreements turn into fights and fights turn into serious violence.

   Occasionally, Gail finds animal carcasses in the parking lot and no sign of whatever slew the animals in question. once, she found a deceased mountain lion that had just strolled into the parking lot from the scrublands out back of the place. No idea what might have slain it to this day.

Other Staff:

While Gail is more than capable of holding down the front desk and lives just above it in case there is a problem. There ARE other employees.

Theresa Patalski is the maid. Theresa is a housekeeping machine. Capable of covering all 25 units in a solid 4 and half hours. Theresa is an Ex-marine friend of Gail’s and is turning herself into something of a jack-leg electrician. She managed to rehab one of the ice machines all by herself.

Morris Stuyvesant is Martin’s son and Gail’s nephew. Morris would be running the place himself except he has a general anxiety disorder and low-grade narcolepsy and frankly any shift other than third stresses him right the fuck out. Morris minds the place while Gail sleeps and as far as that goes, he does a pretty decent job. He’s a little in awe of his aunt and a little stuck on Theresa, but neither of the marines thinks much of poor Morris.

Morris is actually on the payroll of the local vampire sheriff. He's been given a list of weird things to look out for and then had the conscious memory of the list erased. He was approached by a ghoul who posed as a member of local law enforcement and paid like a confidential informant. When he sees something on the list he gets a weird feeling about it and then calls the number.  Suspected vampires translates out to be "Weird and pale and shy" and the person taking notes on the other end has one of the sheriff's deputies out to investigate personally.

Options:

naturally, this place is a slowly simmering bowl of various plots that can be stirred up with a little effort or made to boil over without too much additional effort as written but there are additional possibilities.

1) The hotel might be the roosting place for a Hunter style greater Demon of some sort.

2) You might add additional ghost with lurid deaths that cause additional problems.

3) The Motel is very near the torpored body of a vampire of the Malocusian bloodline and it uses the place as it’s personal feeding ground.

Connections:

Shawna Bishop And Izzy know one another and occasionally, Shawna's perambulations bring her out here.

Vuldorusss isn't far from here, This place is not his area thankfully, but he does explain some of the negative chi flow around this neck of the woods.

Norman Cayce Has noticed a number of bodies have been found in and around this area. A statistically significant number.