Re: The Farm: OOC Discussion
OK, since it is the tradition now, I will state three things I would like my character to be good at:
1. Paperwork, bureaucratic contacts, and forgery
2. Financial transactions and money laundering, particularly into and out of Eastern Europe
3. Cryptography
Jan Vrabec (birth name Johan Auberg) was born in Prague in 1926. His ethnically German father was a printer, and his Czech mother worked for a government department. The family were secular Jews. In 1938, when he was 12 years old, his family reluctantly became involved in espionage, using their contacts and skills to smuggle relatives and friends out of the country after the German annexation.
Jan was gradually drawn in, first as a boy who could move about the city without suspicion, acting as a courier. Later his small size enabled him to break into government and military facilities to photograph documents. He was known throughout the city to various and opposed political groups. His parents, brothers and sisters, and a few friends formed a small but effective spy network, eventually facilitating the escape of more than one hundred people into safety.
Later in the war, as the Nazi occupation government became more severe, the family goal shifted into mere survival. They worked various projects for political parties, gangs, and intelligence services from almost every nation. They bought and sold items on the black market to keep people in their neighborhood fed and medicated. When necessary, to save their lives, they worked for the Abewehr, and even rarely the Gestapo-- playing all sides against the other and somehow not ending up in a concentration camp or before a firing squad.
Miraculously, almost the entire family survived the war, only sister Marta being killed in the February 1945 Allied bombing of the city. In 1947, they had settled down, and were trying to put their lives as spies behind them, hoping to fit in under the new Soviet-backed government and rebuild the country. Then a typhus epidemic swept through the city. Jan's parents and two surviving brothers and sister all died within three days. Jan was left alone. The city burned the whole block as a quarantine measure.
Now identified as an ethnic German, unwelcome in Soviet-aligned Czechoslovakia, and cut off from his contacts, Jan drifted from one refugee camp to another, barely surviving as one of millions of "Displaced Persons" in Europe. In 1949, when he was 21, a former German intelligence officer now working for the Americans recognized him. He was recruited into that man's network. For the last 12 years Jan has been doing freelance work for the British, French, Israeli and other governments who need his particular set of skills.
In 1967 he is 41 years old, but looks 60. He is tall, thin with skinny sloping shoulders, grey hair with resigned brown eyes the only thing alive in a hollow, cadaverous face.
This message was last edited by the player at 17:17, Sat 18 Aug 2018.