N Stanimir

Nikita / Nika Stanimir

NRA flack, in town for the Election but also an old friend of Roger Decameron's

Gender: Male Current Quality: Good

In Game

Plots: Election, The Campus Fire, The Break-in, Political Money

Bluesheets:

Character Hint

Note: this has changed a bit since the original version of the character hint, to give the character more to do.

You are Nika Stanimir, the NRA's main political representative in Violet City, and currently the campaign manager for Senator Newbold. It's a far cry from your youthful days as a naive radical, but times change and you've learned a lot.

Today is going to be tricky as hell, though. Another of those damned downtown office shootings, with lousier timing than usual. The primaries are coming in just a couple of weeks, and now is no time for the politicians to lose their nerve.

Character Sheet

You are Nika Stanimir, and today is going to be complicated. You find yourself feeling like the servant of two masters, trapped in a hurricane. Yeah, not going to be an easy day.

It almost makes you laugh to think about it, but you were kind of a liberal hot-head as a kid. It was the late 80s, the Republican revolution was gathering steam, and you were all fire and testosterone. You wound up one of the ringleaders of Violet City University's own crazy radical group, Violet Justice. There were maybe a dozen of you, but most of the energy and ideas came from the core three: you, Jeri Ferdinand and Vasily Leonard. You were out there all the time, running protests, sit-ins, the whole nine yards. Your parents were pretty proud of you -- they had been hippies in the 60s, and hated Reagan with a burning passion, so they encouraged you to follow in their footsteps. (So long as you kept your grades up.)

You really wish you were still on speaking terms with your parents. Protest marches they could forgive; the NRA, not so much.

The day it all fell apart is a bit of a blur -- zero tolerance drug policies had come into effect on-campus a few years before, but nobody really believed in them yet, and everything was still easy to get. You are fairly sure that one of your friends had convinced you to mix hash and cocaine that afternoon, and the moral of the story is that that's a bad combination.

President Bush (the first one) was scheduled to visit campus that week, and you were all fired up about it. The whole Iraq thing was recent, and the word "warmonger" came easily in those innocent days. Violet Justice had been protesting all week, but the school administration basically just laughed you all off as ineffective troublemakers. You were pissed off about the whole thing even before the drugs; once you were sufficiently high, that mutated into Righteous Fury. You were right; they were wrong; it was up to you to stop it.

It was definitely sometime at night -- you remember that it was dark. And you're pretty sure that you just used a lighter, which shows that God smiles on fools sometimes. It was dumb luck, both that the Administration building actually caught fire (it was early fall, nice and dry), and that you didn't get caught in it. Hell, you're even more lucky the building was actually empty for the night, and that nobody got killed.

But it worked; you remember the fire starting, and you running, totally baked and stoked, over to Jeri's dorm room, to brag about what you'd done. Your first hint that maybe this hadn't been a good idea was her face when she understood what you were talking about, but you were still fired-up and proud. You wanted to shout it to the hills, to show the People that they could stand up to the Establishment and make them listen. But She and Vasily talked you down, thank God, and convinced you to keep quiet about it.

Getting arrested was not fun. It wasn't the first time the cops had grabbed you, of course, but it was the first time you hadn't been allowed to proudly brag about it. You shut up and stonewalled, all the while coming off of the cocaine high and feeling about as miserable as you'd ever been. By the time they let you all go for lack of evidence, you went back to your dorm room and just slept for something like two days.

That was pretty much the end of Violet Justice. The hangers-on hadn't enjoyed getting arrested for something they knew nothing about, and you really thought about your life and your views. You'd always gone along with your parents' Revolution Against the Man thing, but you realized you'd never really looked at the world around you and thought about it. And when you did think about it, you realized that you actually respected what the Republicans were saying more than the Democrats were. And as you looked at how corrupt powerful Democrats like Cranston and Deconcini were, you knew you has to switch sides.

So you widened your circle of friends, reaching across the aisle (as it were) to the young Republican groups on campus, and found that you kind of liked them. You didn't care about most of their social causes, but their views on foreign affairs made more sense the more you read into them. And once they took you down to the rifle range, you were hooked: the target shooting was just plain fun.

It was a long road from there, with a lot of different jobs (mostly in the political sphere) before your membership in the NRA slowly morphed into a job with them. You turned out to be good at the outreach side of things, especially with law enforcement. The years that you acted as the NRA's representative in Violet City have been some of the best of your life, in large part because you've been the point man for supporting and helping the police -- encouraging legislation to give them a freer hand, making sure that their hands aren't excessively tied, and helping them out on a union and personal level with donations from the NRA's funds.

(Somewhere along the way, Vasily decided to put him journalism degree to work over at Fox News. So you two have wound up working together fairly often, with your politics and his reporter synergizing nicely at times.)

Of course, your job has always overlapped with politics, sometimes awkwardly. You will admit that you screwed up during the last Senatorial election, six years ago. According to your polling, Senator Newbold was running neck-and-neck with a pretty anti-Second-Amendment Democrat, and with the likelihood of an Obama win for the White House, every Senate seat mattered. So you hired a few guys to break into the Democratic offices, making it look like a robbery, but really looking for dirt on their candidate. And they succeeded -- turned out that he had an illegal in the family that nobody knew about, which was political gold. But before you could offer it to the Newbold campaign, they found out about it themselves (you'd love to find out how, but the boss hasn't said), and Simon Mercer chewed you out for an hour about making it look like the campaign had committed the break-in. (Not that it stopped them from leaking the information to your old friend Vasily -- he ran it on the news for weeks, and pretty much clinched the election.)

It was embarrassing as hell, but there was a silver lining: you got to know Senator Newbold better. Mercer might have been angry with you, but the Senator liked your gumption, and you wound up friends. So he asked you, a couple of years ago, to be campaign manager this time around, so that he would have someone principled instead of a cynic like Mercer.

That's been interesting, if not as much fun as your NRA work. The political fray is fascinating, although going head-to-head against Simon Mercer (who is now running Jeri's campaign) is a little intimidating. And the truth is, working actively to defeat an old friend sometimes leaves you a little depressed about the whole process, but she made her bed here.

As for today -- well, the problem is, you never did stop being the local NRA rep, you've just toned it down (and taken a salary cut) for the time being. And since Fred Ronit, the hard-right Tea Party challenger in the primary, is a really hardcore Second Amendment believer, the Association decided to back him this time around instead of Senator Newbold. You tried quite hard to change their minds, pointing out that the Senator is a proven winner and stands a better chance in the general election, but the highers-ups like the idea of having someone so gung-ho in Washington. So you've occasionally had to work with the Ronit campaign, managing the Association's donations to him, even while campaigning against him. None of which is illegal, or even necessarily unethical, but it still feels like a weird conflict of interest.

And of course, everybody is descending on Decameron Enterprises this morning, because of this shooting incident. You hate it when stuff like this happens: the left-wing media goes into a feeding frenzy, and the liberal politicians all try to convince everyone that All Guns Must Go Away NowNowNow. It always takes months of hard work to get things back to more sensible positions again...

Who You Know

Reagan Newbold: Your boss, the incumbent Senator. Older, experienced, the sort of strong hand who works well in Washington. Has an unfortunate habit of indiscreetly cheating on him wife Meredith, but has managed to not do anything stupid recently. (Making sure he doesn't do anything stupid is pretty important right now.)
He is only fighting one real problem right now, which is all the money coming into the campaign from the Modern American Freedom PAC. The Ronit and Ferdinand campaigns are making a big deal about this, demanding to know who is behind this PAC; unfortunately, you don't actually know yourself.
Fred Ronit: The Tea Party challenger. Not quite a close friend, but you've spent time down at the range together. Much more socially right-wing than the Senator, but you've had to tack to the right to try and fend off the challenge. Recent polls say that Newbold stands a stronger chance against Ferdinand than Ronit does, which may give you an edge with the voters who actually care about winning the general election.
Used to work at Decameron Enterprises, if you recall correctly. Not quite sure what he did there, but might be worth looking at.
Jeri Ferdinand: One of your oldest friends, who unfortunately didn't learn from her youth, and wound up as the Democratic Mayor of Violet City. Still a friend, although you certainly aren't close any more.
Simon Mercer: The current manager of the Ferdinand campaign, and former manager of the Newbold one. He is a creature of no morals at all, as far as you can tell, but has a reputation for knowing all the dirt on everyone.
Vasily Leonard: Another old friend, now an anchor / reporter over at Fox News. You have stayed fairly close to him over the years, and that's been fruitful -- having a reporter to leak information to, who is reliably on your side, is one hell of an advantage in politics. The question now is, can you convince him to support Newbold instead of Ronit?
Roger Forrester: Older reporter with CBS. Fairly left-wing, like most of the mainstream media.
Roger Cameron: The head of Decameron Enterprises. Good guy -- you've spent time with him down at the range over the years.
Rhona Finlay: One of the local beat cops, who you've talked with from time to time at various police-union functions. Last year, she came to you with money problems, so you gave her a fair chunk -- something like one or two grand -- out of the Police Benevolent Fund, a slush fund you have access to for such things. You don't ask repayment for it, but she understands that she owes you a favor.

GM Notes

Might make hir a campaign manager for Senator Newbold? That would give hir more ties. Yes, let's do that.

Has been working fairly closely with V Leonard for many years now -- they both trended towards the right after college, and found that their respective careers in politics and media supported each other nicely.

Major donor to the Police Union's Benevolent Fund, funneling NRA money into it, so a well-known face to the cops. Has let a number of beat cops know that, if they have any money problems, to come to him for help. (From a quiet NRA slush fund for this purpose.) Finlay did so early last year, for a couple thousand dollars, and owes him a favor as a result.

Member of: Politicians