Nikola Mirković

Chesterfield Act Registry of the Expressive Database

File #11 Feb 2019 01:03

Summary

Name Nikola Mirković (Никола Мирковић) Aliases Status Unregistered Expressive Ability Nervous System Manipulation Gender Male Birthdate 10 November 1980 Age 38 Height 6'0" / 183 cm Build Fit; slightly underweight Eyes Blue Hair Dark Brown Residence Rochester, New York, U.S.A. Employment Translator and interpreter, Coldbridge Financial Solutions Parents Miroslav and Dijana Mirković Siblings N/A Marital Status Engaged to Spencer Greaves Children N/A First Scene The Most Well-Deserved Wine Last Scene Profile A Serbian immigrant whose major claims to fame are a shady wartime past and a stint as cellist in the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra. Since taking up residence in the US, he has been working for Coldbridge Financial Solutions as a translator and interpreter.

portrayed by Cedric Bihr

Background

Nikola was born to a middle-class family located in Belgrade, which at the time was the capital city of what was the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Both of his parents were educated working professionals: his father Miroslav was a pharmacist and his mother Dijana was an electrical engineer. Dijana chose to name her first and only child after a Serbian national icon and an intellect she personally had great admiration for. In 1980, the year Nikola was born, Tito died, the Yugoslav economy began its collapse, and ethnic nationalism reared its ugly head.

To his parents' mild disappointment, as he grew older he ended up with an artistic temperament rather than a technical one to match theirs, but that didn't stop them from fully supporting his love of fine art and music. As a spoiled only child, he received the best that they parents could provide: music lessons, drawing lessons, and frequent visits to museums, concerts, and galleries. Nikola excelled in the arts and acquired particular fondness for string instruments, focusing his interest on cello and violin by the end of primary school. All around him, the country grew more and more unstable under the influence of a flood of nationalistic rhetoric. At the outset of the Bosnian War in 1992, things came to a head — Nikola had gotten fully hooked by the drama of everything happening around him, and insisted to his parents that he wanted to participate in the conflict to defend the interests of ethnic Serbs. They forbade him from doing so, but all of thirteen, strong-willed, stubborn, and thoroughly seduced by promises of glory and honor, he simply got onto a bus one day on his way home from school and headed towards Bosnia, posting a letter back to his parents while enroute explaining where he had gone. Once arrived, he had little trouble getting closer and closer to the combat zone, eventually encountering a unit of the Army of Republika Srpska, which welcomed him with open arms.

Shortly afterwards, his ability manifested — first used accidentally on a fellow soldier during a fire fight, who suddenly found himself incapable of speech or movement, and was subsequently shot by enemy combatants due to his failure to move into cover. From then until the close of the war, Nikola clandestinely made use of his ability, practicing and perfecting it on captured enemies and, once or twice, employing it during the torture of said captives. The horrors of warfare in general had a great impact on Nik, especially once his unit began to assist in the perpetration of war crimes against the Bosniaks, up to and including their presence at and participation in acts of ethnic cleansing. Nikola saw active combat throughout the war and was wounded twice. In 1995, after NATO intervention, the war ended and he returned home.

His parents, relieved to have their son back, welcomed him with open arms despite their unhappiness and disappointment with his participation in the war. Nothing could convince him to share details of his experiences, and rather than allow him to mope around at home in the rhythmic limbo he began to sink into, his mother re-enrolled him in secondary school. Seeking understanding, he eventually opened up to his parents about his ability, though not what he had been using it for. Though understandably dumbfounded, they chose to keep his secret while also learning as much as they could about it through experimentation and research. Many nights were spent poring over increasingly specific textbooks until eventually they collectively came up with a reasonable hypothesis about just what it was that Nikola was actually doing. Though things had more or less by then settled back to normal, Nikola's plans to apply to university were suddenly derailed when the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia began in 1999. Fortunately, the bombing did not last too long, and he was accepted the next year into the University of Arts in Belgrade, specifically into the Faculty of Fine Arts to specialize in painting. He only lasted in that program for half a year before switching over to the Faculty of Music, eventually earning a Bachelor of Music with a double minor in violin and cello performance.

Nikola graduated in 2003, and though he was knee-deep into auditions with local ensembles, he had little luck actually winning himself a seat in an already-entrenched artistic community. Still terribly disquieted from the war, he packed his things and embarked on the great and terrifying misadventure that is life as a traveling artist, leaving the country entirely in search of work, a better economy, and somewhere that didn't remind him so much of what he had done. Over the next several years he lived in many different places, usually in areas known for high immigrant populations where his presence would not be considered remarkable, and for the most part circulated through Central European countries where he knew at least one of the national languages. Most often he gravitated towards German-speaking nations thanks to his very strong German language skills, or to those where his command of English or French ensured his daily functioning. His longest stays were in Germany and the Czech Republic, though notable others included the UK, France, Austria, and Switzerland. When just starting out, he usually balanced a mix of odd jobs while looking for work as a professional musician, including working as an unlicensed tour guide, as an unskilled worker in any number of industries, or as a street performer. During times when such irregular employment was not enough to support him, he resorted to petty crime. Eventually, though, he began to break in to the orchestral scene, and began netting long-term engagements with various performing groups. A lover of travel in general, he kept on the move, seeking work with traveling ensembles whenever possible.

In 2011, Nikola returned home to Belgrade and moved back in with his parents to try to navigate the task of resuming his life in his now much more stable home country. He began aggressively auditioning for empty chairs in the various orchestras within Serbia, and after several months of failure managed to land an audition for a suddenly-vacant cellist seat. To his delight, he was offered a place in the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra. He very much enjoyed his time there, but in 2016 he was approached by Adam Monroe, whose attention had been directed towards Nik thanks to the suggestion of another Shedda operative, Spencer Greaves, with whom he had been in touch on a friendly basis since 2008. Once again enticed by a brand of self-interested nationalism, Nikola soon agreed to join Shedda and began making plans to move to Rochester. Though very reluctant to leave the BPO and not at all enamored of the idea of office-based employment, Nikola has mostly settled into his cover as a translator and interpreter for Coldbridge Financial Solutions.

Psych Profile

Nikola generally comes off as level-headed, deliberate, a little vain, direct to the point of being perceived as blunt, unusually soft-spoken for a Serb, and sometimes a bit standoffish or aloof. He is usually a very good example of a man who exercises reasonable restraint even in extremely high-stress situations. He's got a sense of humor, often dark and fond of satire. Nik enjoys indulging in worldly pleasures, such as listening to a symphony or tasting a fine wine, and invests himself heavily in seeking out such experiences as often as possible. Most of his interpersonal relationships are relatively superficial, but when he truly bonds with another person, he grows deeply protective of and loyal to them. That said, Nik also prefers to have his needs catered to, and can be manipulative towards those around to him in pursuit of his own comfort and convenience to the point of being a bit of a leech if he's not somehow put in check. When among strangers, he sometimes pretends to not understand English when he thinks it will benefit him to claim ignorance, or at least to not understand it as well as he really does - he is very good at pretending to be a novice speaker instead of a fluent one.

Throughout his life, Nik has been susceptible to flattery and cleverly-spun nationalistic narratives; these days, he is most concerned with how the Evolved are treated by the non-Evolved, and he is furious about being regarded by the world at large as a potential danger. This has galvanized his conviction that he not be victimized in the same way he has seen others victimized, and is willing to do whatever it takes to save himself and carve out a safe piece of the world where he can actually settle in and maybe even let his guard down once in a while.

Being a former child soldier comes with its fair share of baggage. In Nikola's case, he harbors extensive unresolved war trauma and an attending set of post-traumatic stress symptoms: sleep disturbance, intrusive memories and recurrent nightmares, irritability, depressed mood, and persistent feelings of shame and guilt. Thanks to past misdeeds, Nikola considers himself in some ways to be morally irredeemable, but therefore also a good candidate to Do What Must Be Done to protect himself and those like him. He does have inhibitions when it comes to performing violent or unethical acts, but his boundaries lie far outside of society's norms. When he is pushed past his limits and his natural restraint is lost, he becomes wildly unpredictable and capable of extreme behavior.

Evolved Ability

Ability: Nervous System Manipulation
Nikola is able to manipulate the nervous systems of living beings, including his own. Nikola's power functions via very subtle (and, on their own, usually both harmless and painless) organic electric pulses that originate in his brain, and when used on others, these pulses pass through his body into that of his victim, moving to said victim's central nervous system (CNS) through their peripheral nervous system (PNS) through contact with the nerves in the dermis. These tiny jolts — which are small enough that they are not felt at all unless he is overexerting himself — interrupt normal nerve activity, and Nikola is experienced enough to be able to produce targeted effects. When his own brain is excited it is easier for him to produce larger effects, and while he has never caused lasting sensory damage to another person (and does not wish to try, correctly believing this to be an incredibly unwise risk to his own health and safety), he theoretically could do so by attempting to outright damage a victim's neurons instead of disrupting them.

This ability is fueled by caloric expenditure. Since Nik passively uses his ability to enhance his daily experiences, he very often functions at a level where his TDEE is not sufficiently met by consumed foods. Accordingly, he has had long-term problems with being somewhat underweight ever since his ability manifested. Output of his ability on an unusually significant level may require that he be subjected to enough stimuli or chemical interference to overexcite his system and thereby generate enough brain activity to overload his ability beyond its normal parameters. In general, prescription amphetamines are his go-to for performance enhancing drugs.

Nikola has had enough practice with his ability to be very good at controlling it. While in his youth it took him longer to achieve potent effects, he can now produce significant ones over short spans of contact. He is also now very proficient at estimating the amount of time that the impact of his ability will be effective in the average human being. Generally speaking, it would be unusual for any lingering effect on another human to last longer than about half an hour - more typically they are much shorter, anywhere from one second to ten minutes. The more effects he attempts to simultaneously produce with his ability, the shorter lingering effects can last. For example, compromising sight may last for about ten minutes, but if he were to alter both sight and hearing in his victim, it might only last five. Nik can refresh an effect by periodically resuming physical contact with his target.

Physical Controls
Nikola can compromise effective communication between the spinal cord and PNS in order to temporarily alter or neutralize functional movement of limbs, muscles, the mouth, etc. He usually needs at least a full minute of contact to cause the paralysis of any major body part - more often he would likely cause numbness or muscle spasms. He is technically capable of disrupting automatic bodily functions - such as heart operation, organ functions, and glandular maintenance - but this would take a considerable amount of time and effort. With the amount of exposure he normally has to a victim, between five and ten seconds, he would usually be able to do no more than stagger or thoroughly scare someone by causing brief heart palpitations or similar symptoms.

Sensory Manipulation
Nikola can temporarily alter the way the brain processes information transmitted by the physical senses. He can presumably achieve this in any combination and also cause the effects to linger, but the greater the number of senses to be affected and the greater the length of time being sought both commensurately lengthen the amount of time that direct contact is required and how much effort it takes to achieve. The scope of this aspect of his ability ranges from discombobulating the sense involved (such as causing blurry or double vision) to turning its sensitivity up to 11. When using this aspect of his ability on short notice or with minimal length of contact, he is not always able to cause the specific effects he desires and is just able to disrupt the sense with variable results; the longer he is in physical contact with his target, the more precise the effects of his ability become. Though he can target any sense, a favorite nasty trick of his is to cause a victim's sense of touch or hearing to become egregiously over-sensitized.

Emulation of Symptoms
Though he does not dare to try to cause permanent damage to others' nervous systems, Nikola can cause temporary emulation of that damage. Key options are headaches, blurry vision, fatigue, behavioral changes, leg or arm numbness, loss of coordination, weakness or loss of muscle strength, slurred speech, tremors, emotional processing problems, memory loss, and confusion. He is technically capable of causing seizures, but has not attempted to do so. He can also use this ability to emulate pain by short-circuiting a victim's pain receptors, and has become rather good at creating phantom pains of specific types, such as burning or cutting.

Self-Enhancement
Nikola can use his ability on himself. Though the learning process involved in perfecting this was not a pretty one, these days he's good at it and no longer unintentionally overexerts or overstimulates himself (or both). Having become quite the sensory hedonist, he enjoys boosting his natural senses usually simply to enhance the mundane: being able to listen more closely to a recital, tasting his meals with richer and deeper layers of flavor, or enjoying the touch of another person. More practical applications are usually centered around smell and hearing, as temporarily improving those senses has any number of useful benefits. He cannot bring any of his senses beyond the normal range of human ability, but he can cause his brain to focus hyperacutely on one or two at a time, giving him significantly greater clarity of sensory processing and experience.

Appendices

Factoids

• Common Knowledge: Nikola is a Serbian immigrant who currently serves dual roles as an interpreter and translator for Coldbridge Financial Solutions in Rochester, NY. He's a smoker. He wears a band on his right ring finger.
• Known to Some: Nikola is engaged to Spencer Greaves. Not many people in the U.S. know that he was a combatant in the Bosnian War, or that he was twice wounded in action; those who know of his involvement are presumably capable of doing the math on how old he was at the time.
• Known to Few: The details of Nikola's military service are kept utterly private, and are discussed with almost no one save for his fiancé. Before his current relationship with Spencer, Nikola had earned himself a reputation as an indiscriminate heartbreaker who romantically pursued both male and female partners.

Skills

• Artistic: Nikola has an artist's eye, and since he's got both raw ability and professional training, he's quite good. He dropped out of a fine arts degree in painting, but still enjoys drawing recreationally, most often with pencils, charcoal, or ballpoint pens. He has excellent penmanship. Thanks to extensive study since childhood, a university degree in music, and years of working as a performer, Nikola plays the violin and cello at a professional level. Though no longer affiliated with an orchestra, he would like to pursue such an opportunity if ever one presented itself.
• Jack of All Trades: While still a starving artist just starting out in his career, Nik held a very wide array of temporary jobs. He is not a skilled laborer by any means, but he does have experience with under-the-table work and unskilled industries in general, especially when those industries employ high volumes of migrant workers. He has accordingly cobbled together an extremely eclectic and disconnected variety of skills, none of which are terribly developed, but many of which are nevertheless useful, such as basic carpentry and rudimentary plumbing.
• Military Veteran: Nikola knows how to use, maintain, and to some extent repair firearms and other modern weaponry. He is not an exceptional shot; his marksmanship is basically average, though he does have the benefit of active combat experience and is accustomed to functioning while under fire. He is familiar with military protocols, ranks, and commands, and has a reasonable knowledge of military strategy (most notably guerrilla and urban tactics).
• Polyglot: Nikola was raised in a multilingual society where a minority of residents are monolingual. Serbo-Croat, his mother tongue, is close enough to other southern Slavonic languages that he can usually make himself understood to their speakers and vice-versa with varying degrees of effectiveness and accuracy. In school, he chose to pursue deeper education in "useful" Western languages — English was taught in public schools, and he acquired fluency through a mix of long-term schooling and consuming American and British media. He took on German as a second language course in his secondary school and continued studying it (and eventually also French) while in university and beyond, likewise immersing himself in books and television shows. English and German are his strongest secondary languages, which is to say that he is fluent in both, and while he is not fluent in French he is reasonably competent. His Serbian accent is fairly strong when he speaks French or English and he is readily identifiable as a non-native speaker, but his command of German pronunciation is practically flawless thanks to the years he has spent living in primarily German-speaking countries.
• Vehicles: Nik can drive both manual and automatic transmission cars and ride a motorcycle. He knows how to sail a sailboat, and has briefly driven a tank or two in his time and could probably get one moving if he had to. The realities of life in Eastern Europe mean he's pretty decent at troubleshooting and repairing mechanical problems experienced by older and less-electronically-dependent vehicles, as well as simply performing regular vehicle maintenance.

Relationships

Cherished

	Fiancé. Genuinely beloved, and Nik's #1 priority after his own well-being. Nik is fully aware of just how lucky he is to have found someone who treats him as well as Spencer does, and he tries to reciprocate such consideration and care.

Less So

	stuff

Decidedly Not

	stuff

Logs

13 February, 2019: The Most Well-Deserved Wine
4 March, 2019: If You Insist

Miscellany/Author's Notes

• Moderate smoker. Nik has been smoking since he was 13, having picked up the habit shortly after joining the army. He's never managed to kick it.
• Caffeine addict. Huge coffee drinker; takes it black and usually very strong. Also loves tea, particularly black tea.
• Cosmopolite. As a man frequently on the move for his work for quite some time, Nikola has lived in a number of major European cities outside of his hometown of Belgrade. These cities include (but are not limited to) Birmingham, Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Cologne, Salzburg, Brno, Prague, Plzeň, Ostrava, Zürich, Bern, Winterthur, Toulon, Nice, Istanbul, Warsaw, and Lublin.

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