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Jan Ziemniak Bartosz

<"Hello, friend. Have you seen a golden box?">

0 · 331 views · located in Crisis

a character in “Call of Pandora”, as played by TheHaze

Description

(If you need anything changed, let me know!)

Name: Jan Ziemniak Bartosz

Nicknames: “Potato” (Only by his family), Kotwica (“Anchor”), The Golem of Warsaw.

Affiliation: Unaffiliated but possesses a knowledge of the supernatural.

Age: 25

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Straight, as far as he cares.

Ethnicity: Polish

Appearance: Jan looks like he’s seen hell, and he has. His hard eyes and his grim, stone-faced visage mark him as a survivor of a hard and dangerous life. His incredible stature probably helped him with that, as he’s well over six feet tall and rather muscular. He typically keeps his dark hair shaved short and sports a scraggly six o’ clock shadow. A pair of thick jeans, leather boots, and a plain white t-shirt is about all he wears. He partially gets his nickname from an old jacket from the Polish Home Army with the “Anchor” flag on the right arm that he wears whenever he can, pairing it with his maciejowka cap.

Personality: Jan has the outward appearance of a thuggish man who will murder you for looking at him. In truth, he is a very amiable if somewhat slow man who will fiercely defend those he feels are in danger. He has kicked down doors, people, and in one case, walls to keep the peace in his district in Warsaw. He is also a surprisingly spiritual person who is very open-minded for someone of his upbringing, and he is always willing to learn more about the fantastic. While he can be very friendly, he can also be a nauseatingly brutal individual if he feels such behavior is justified.

Armament: While Jan normally fights with his fists, he carries a Viz 35 pistol and a hunting knife if things go bad.

Strengths:
-Jan is gargantuan, utilizing his massive frame to overpower his enemies and remain standing even after most would collapse. His experience on the street means he’s ruthlessly pragmatic in combat.

-Due to a very superstitious and traditional upbringing, Jan has a bafflingly intuitive sense of spirituality of the supernatural and the knowledge of what harms and wards what, even if he doesn’t know why.

-This allows him to accept and endure impossible things far better than the average human, and as a result he’s very difficult to rattle.

-His mother also taught him everything she knows about traditional Polish cooking, because she grew tired of feeding him so much food on her own.

Weaknesses:
-Jan is a massive target, meaning when the bullets start to fly, he’s going to be the first to get hit. In addition, he sticks out (literally) in a crowd.

-Jan is, for all of his practical knowledge, rather dim. He was never educated and doesn’t care about
science, computers, and advanced medicine and can easily be caught off guard by simply not knowing about what the enemy is using against him.

-Jan’s English is rather poor.

History: Other than the darkness in his life, Jan’s past is of little consequence to him. He grew poor in Warsaw, like countless others, getting into fights for food and using his massive size to keep his brothers and sisters safe from harm. He would find his entertainment by listening to his mother and grandmother, who would tell him the stories of the old world and how things wait in the dark for bad children. As he got older, the fights grew deadlier and the spoils grew larger as he began to fight gangs and other thugs to secure the safety of his street. Eventually he gained a reputation as a monster among the gangs of the slums, a golem who could not be killed with weapons, tearing down walls and entire buildings to kill everyone inside, a legend of his own. While those tales were grossly exaggerated, they frightened his family, and when he turned twenty they asked him to cease his fighting and work a real job. He relented, mortified, and spent five years working as a groundskeeper at the local church. All the while, however, he felt the call to go out and do something about the darkness he saw in the alleys and sewers, the darkness nobody else could see. He could feel it, gathering for something big even though he couldn’t even begin to understand why. Finally, he could stand it no longer, and his fears culminated in a dream more vivid than any he had experienced before. It was a burning city, not Warsaw, but an American one. Destroying the city were monsters he recognized from the tales told by his mother all those years ago, the others were beyond anything he could imagine. He awoke screaming, the first time since he was a child, and immediately gathered his items, fleeing in the night to the nearest airport. He knew where he needed to go. New York was going to fall, and he had to do everything he could to stop it. But what was that golden box...and who was opening it?

So begins...

Jan Ziemniak Bartosz's Story

Setting

Characters Present

Character Portrait: [NPC] Bartender Character Portrait: Jan Ziemniak Bartosz
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#, as written by TheHaze
Jan walked out into the street, taking in the sounds and smells of New York. He couldn’t help but feel a pang of nervousness as he realized how...foreign he felt. He had figured it would be difficult, obviously, his English wasn’t very good at all and didn’t understand the currency, for starters. He could navigate the airport, somewhat, and the lady at the currency exchange booth had been very patient with him in her attempts to teach him what coins were worth what, but now the enormity of what he had done was beginning to sink in. He had left for a good reason, Jan knew that, but he had, well, left. He had left his family, his home, his people behind, and for what? That thought crossed his mind and the dream came screaming back into his head: That hideous, apocalyptic dream of burning buildings and unimaginable beasts ravaging the city because of that golden box and that gi-. He buckled slightly, steadying himself against a pillar as panic weakened his legs.

Jan couldn’t help but note the group around him sidle away as he leaned to his side. He expected it, being nearly seven feet tall. His massive frame already drew stares back home, but here he felt people saw him as even stranger. He assumed it was due to his clothing, specifically his jacket. He loved that jacket, even though his family felt it was a bit eccentric. Nobody wore that symbol anymore and some even got upset by it, seeing as a reminder of dark times, but that was why Jan liked it. For Jan, it was a symbol of resistance against an evil of unthinkable magnitude, a symbol that he feared would be needed in the days ahead. This type of fear he was feeling now, then, was unacceptable. If he was to fight this evil and cleanse the city, he needed to remain strong.

Jan tilted his head back, let his bag drop, and inhaled deeply, willing himself to be calm. He felt his mind focus and balance on the knife's edge between fear and anger, settling on the ocean-deep sense of duty that began to focus his mind. Jan exhaled, his breath coming out low, hard, almost like a growl. He had a job to do. The giant nodded to himself, picked up his bag, and began to walk across the street to...where?

Ah. He didn’t know. He had thought there would have already been some devastation, given the severity of his dream, but everything seemed relatively normal. He assumed it was normal, anyway. He was secretly dreading that New York would be like the movies, with people in suits shooting out of cars and shouting in horrific accents. So far, he had only heard the accent, and the thought that he wasn’t in immediate danger helped him relax and gather his thoughts

So, he had a problem with no apparent solution. He had no idea where he was going and no idea where to start finding out where to go. He supposed, then, the first thing he would do was ask somebody. Easy. He could do that. Yes.

As it turned out, he most definitely could not do that. He began to suspect this after one hour of searching and finally admitted it around hour three. He asked about the golden box, monster sightings, and any unusual activities. If people didn’t flee at the sight of him, the language barrier made getting his point across an exercise in pointing, gesturing, and for one man, twenty dollars. For his efforts, he had been directed to a Chinese restaurant, a zoo, three different hospitals, a massage parlor, and finally one very impatient police officer, who told him to stop. He did, but that only made him realize how hungry he was. He hadn’t eaten on the plane and it was getting late, after all.

And so Jan found himself back in the Chinese restaurant, which he assumed was called the Golden Box. He had never had Chinese food before, but he liked whatever it was he was eating and it was a lot cheaper than he had expected. He got a noodle dish with what he guessed was pork and some kind of beer with a label he couldn’t read, but it had cost him eight dollars and the waitress was pretty, so he wasn’t going to complain.

As he ate, he formulated another plan. He wouldn’t ask about any supernatural occurrences, rather go to locations where supernatural things would be likely to occur. He figured landmarks and places with significant history, preferably a grim and storied one, would be ideal. Failing that, somewhere with a lot of people, because monsters needed to eat. He knew about the statue of liberty, the empire state building, and central park. Where they were, he didn’t know, but he could find out.

It turned out the closest was Central Park, which was where Jan found himself sitting, watching a pair of old men play chess. Other than the occasional jogger and a cough from one of the elders, nothing really seemed to be happening. The giant grunted and pulled a large hand-rolled cigarette from his jacket pocket, lighting it with a match and inhaling deeply, letting the smoke out with a sigh. As he watched the smoke float away, he leaned back and closed his eyes to rest, weary from a day of failure.

<"Just what have I gotten myself into?">

He figured it out when the world exploded. Light and fire and screaming woke him from his peace as he was flung from the bench and sent skidding across the grass. Jan's heart thumped like a hammer in his chest as he began to see them. The things. It was starting. Good god in heaven it was starting. He forced himself to his feet, ears ringing and blood leaking from the corner of his mouth. He had to get off the street. Lurching forward as fast as he could, the giant drew his pistol in one hand and his knife in the other, stepping over corpses in his drive towards whatever building looked safe. He noticed one man, running, who seemed strong. Jan followed behind him at a distance, seeing him enter what looked like a cafe. The griffon encouraged him to enter it as soon as possible. He looked at his surroundings, and then the man. He began to shout in Polish, falling back to his native tongue unconsciously, his voice guttural and deep.

<"It is beginning, friend! The end of the world is upon us!"> He chambered his gun, keeping it trained on the what was left of the door. "<I am Jan! Are you alone?>"

Setting

Characters Present

Character Portrait: Alias Kane Character Portrait: Catherine Deckard Character Portrait: Jan Ziemniak Bartosz
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0.00 INK

══════════════════════
"Out of the frying pan..."
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Alias Kane
Hex Code: #8B0000
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Image
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Alias stayed crouched in the small, burning cafe. He still cradled the girl in his arms, and she showed no sign of waking. Her arm still had a few light spots of blood, and would occasionally glow in an odd purple light. Besides that, she seemed fine. Just a sleeping child.

His thoughts were interrupted when the cafe shook again, raining dust down on his head. Just as the dust settled, a large man dressed in a old, thick jacket walked through the doorway. The massive man carried a blade and a gun, and seemed more than comfortable holding both. When their eyes connected, he began speaking. Unfortunately it was in Polish. Alias' Polish had been rusty before, but in this situation, it was almost nonexistent. The only words Alias managed to catch were "< I am Jan! Are you alone? >"

"Jan, we need to move. My arms are full, I hope you can keep them off me." Then, standing up he added, "We need to get to the next-"

A griffon dropped through the window, sending glass everywhere. It held a squirming body of a businessman in its beak, and whether it he was from within the shop or not didn't really matter anymore, as the only separation they had, the wall-length glass window, was now broken to pieces with an angry flock of griffons just outside.

"Jan move!" Alias ran for the other end of the shop, dodging past several upturned tables and large pieces of rubble. The other end of the shop was in the same state of ruin as the first, but it was notably further from the griffon that had just invited itself for a free meal. Not stopping at the door, Alias reared back, and kicked at the bent metal frame as hard as he could. The door fell off it's hinges and Alias didn't bother looking back before running through.

Outside of the shop, things were worse. Much worse. Griffons still dominated the skies, flying between buildings, snatching up people, and tossing about cars and anything else not nailed down. Cars still littered the street, clustered together and pushed about to form long, winding narrow paths in between the abandoned wreaks. Only hoping Jan was behind him, and able to employ the same tactic, Alias ducked down, keeping his head below the roofs of the cars. Another griffon flew overhead, narrowly missing Alias' head.

Turning past an abandoned yellow taxi, he stopped. Another red wave was bearing down upon the city. It was much faster than the first, reaching the ground in mere moments, tossing cars around once more, nearly crushing him and the girl between the taxi and a red sedan.

He took off again, running past a young man, only for him to get grabbed and hauled into the sky. Spotting a rather pristine flatbed truck ahead of them, he began running towards it, hoping to find cover within, when the truck moved. It jumped, skittered, and twitched. It sparked, and lashed out small bolts of more energy to the nearby cars. The other cars began sparking, and quickly skittered towards the truck, clumping together. Soon more cars and vehicles started picking up, flying over the truck and landing against a faint amalgamation of rubble and cars. The truck soon fell, and like leaves caught in a storm, picked up from the ground, and flew back to a huge roughly human creature. The creature was the size of a building, and stood hunched over, it's massive arms barely dragging on the ground. It had cars and sections of buildings jutting out from it randomly, and as it moved, metal bent, concrete shattered, and plating tore.

The golem walked slowly down the street, each step caving in sections of the road. It turned, diverging into an alley, forcing it's way through the buildings as more rubble and cars followed the creature's path of destruction. With the street suddenly clear, Alias was forced to follow the golem, heading into one of the broken buildings. Water mains were broken, electrical wiring exposed, and vents gaped out of the side of the building, but it was the only safe haven from the griffons.

But before he could clear the distance, a griffon fell to the ground, tearing a path through the pavement as it skidded to the ground. It was clearly wounded, but even after having fallen, it's powerful body twitched, and stood back up. The griffon looked dazed for a moment, before turning towards Alias. Still holding the girl from the museum, he could only hope Jan was behind him, or perhaps something even scarier than that.

He was disarmed, standing before a creature that wouldn't hesitate to kill him.

The griffon roared, and lunged.