Petri Ovaska

NAME:
Petri Ovaska

AGE:
35

GENDER:
Male

NATIONALITY:
Finnish

BIRTHPLACE:
Lahti, Finland

BIRTHDATE:
February 18th, 1977

PICTURE:

Spoiler:

DESCRIPTION:
The very first words you'd likely use to describe Petri Ovaska would be "classically handsome".  Standing at a commanding 6'2" and hovering somewhere near 200 pounds, his pale blue eyes and well maintained blonde locks (cropped to a medium/short hair style you'd find comfortably at home on a 1950's mannequin) add to the practically Aryan impression Petri gives off.  The man is well muscled, lean and built for combat, all of which adds to the chiseled beauty of the man (despite just how oblivious he is to that fact).  His face tends towards seriousness more often than not, and a difficult childhood will do that to you.  Nonetheless, when he smiles he positively beams, and when around those he trusts he's much more likely to be expressive.

Truth be told, he's not the sort to give much attention to his looks (did I mention how oblivious he is to his own handsomeness?), but when your father was a fine men's tailor at a time when that sort of custom work was becoming a rarity?  You end up with a man who at the very least knows how to dress.  Casual is the preference, but always cut well and properly fitted.  Fabrics that are comfortable and durable.  Jeans and a plain but well tailored button down are a regular appearance in his wardrobe, and though he's been known to toss on the occasional t-shirt, something in him dislikes the way they look on his body (no matter how much his girlfriend insists otherwise).  Having a tall frame and a long torso does a lot to make a man distrust factory-made clothes.  His years of military service have also taught him a number of useful habits that have clung to him through his whole adult life, and the way he treats what he wears is no exception.  The most important bits: loose clothes limit mobility and get caught when you least want them to.

His excursions into Inferis have given him an excuse to bring back the military styles he was so comfortable in earlier in life.  Black pants stuffed into well polished, calf height military-grade combat boots, laced in the front and topped with a leather knee-flap for protection.  A matching black leather belt gives way to a tucked-in crimson red shirt (generally left open at the collar) and an optional black military-style coat.  In order to support the somewhat complex physics of balance required by his favorite prototype gear he generally wears a harness-like set of crossed belts, a pair across each thigh that connect both to the main belt at his waist as well as cross behind the knees to hook into his boots.  An additional harness extends from his belt up and across his torso, a pair of crossing straps reinforced by a final strap across the front of his chest, all of which works in harmony to provide maximum control over movement while utilizing his prototype equipment.

PERSONALITY:
Petri has always been a serious and focused individual.  Even as a child, he'd be more interested in listening than in speaking and even then prefers to ask questions that get others rolling than to ramble on himself.  The deeply inquisitive streak from his childhood has been tempered with time and wisdom and while he is deeply curious about the world at large, the people around him and very much so the inhabitants of Inferis, he knows how to control that curiosity and push for answers only when it yields maximum rewards.  His seriousness and studiousness were somewhat sidetracked by a lack of formal education in his early years, but that hasn't kept him from learning and honing himself over time.  Somewhere in his mind he desires as much knowledge as he possibly can, but the more important thing is why he wants to learn.

The demon hunter's demeanor has generally minimized the number of people he gets close to, but that's for the best because once inside his inner circle?  He will defend them to the death.  He is passionate about protecting the things and people he values, and at the core of this is a belief that no one should be able to have power over him and those who are most important.  The tool he uses to achieve these ends is knowledge and the ability to apply it.  He discovered his other half in just such a mission, a brilliant yet overly excitable scientist named Kira who he had the most astonishing luck to run into.  Her passion for acquiring knowledge for its own sake and his desire to learn and apply knowledge made them fit together in a brilliantly satisfying way.  And now that she sits at the center of his circle, he would never allow her to come to harm.

It's also worth noting that the only exception to Petri's generally calm and serious demeanor comes from combat.  The more intense the action, the more deeply he falls into it, entering a state rather akin to blood lust in the deepest throes of battle.  While his main combat skills lay with explosives and demolition (a simple skill to acquire having spent years obsessed with chemistry) he is almost equally at home with hand to hand, close quarters combat and grappling.  The difference being that the later pushes his heart rate and gets his adrenaline pumping, which both improves his stamina and hones him into an almost meditative state.  This can lead him to be somewhat unpredictable in combat…although Kira has the uncanny ability to calm him down (when she's not the reason he's getting excited, if you follow my meaning…)  This discovery has made them an even more potent fighting team since she can pull him back from the edge of madness when he's in the depths of battle.

Hatred is a hard thing for Petri, but if he felt it towards anything it would be demons.  He's never been a particularly religious man, but having set foot in Inferis?  He finds the entire demonic culture to be unsettling verging on horrendous.  Here is a powerful group of beings who are more inclined to tear down than build up, those willing to sacrifice knowledge, resources, even lives for no reason but minimal personal gain.  While his abhorrence of these things lead close to hatred, the truth is that he has known quite a few pitiful or repentant demons who deserve remorse rather than wrath.  Either way, he feels compelled to allow Kira to take the lead when it comes to the subjects of demons, trusting her implicitly and knowing that whatever she learns will contribute to their survival and that of the rest of the human race.

Where the Templar order is concerned…Petri admires and admonishes them all at once.  Their rigid structure has allowed them to engineer some of the most impressive and powerful demon killing apparatuses ever imagined by man and their training creates focused, potent soldiers capable of holding their own against demons without any Infernal power.  Still, they are arbitrary in their execution of justice and mindless in the pursuit of their goals, willing to go through people like those he loves in order to achieve their goals.  He will not allow them to hurt Kira.  Period.

HISTORY:
For a short while, Petri lived an extraordinarily happy and peaceful childhood.  His parents were both hunters who had avoided having children for many years, largely for fear of bringing the hunter gene forward a generation and burdening their progeny with it.  After a decade together, the pair finally decided to hang up their hunting belts (as best it was possible to) and devote themselves to having a small family.  His father returned to the trade of his youth, opening a small but successful tailor's shop, catering to high end custom suits and wealthy clients in general and the family thrived.  The pair were bright, sociable and goofy as hell (not to mention absolutely in love) and so his first 13 years were both extraordinarily blessed and extraordinarily normal.  He was a friendly but quiet child, inquisitive and bright by all standards and was as a general rule extremely well behaved.  He learned quickly and frequently looked for quiet opportunities to apply the knowledge he soaked up like a sponge.  Some of his fondest early memories involved learning to build model rockets, eventually going so far as to create his own rocket engines (little more than glorified fireworks, but quite an accomplishment for a ten year old boy) and trying his hardest to track them down when they landed.

Growing up on the outskirts of a small but reasonably well off Finnish city also meant he had access to some of Scandinavia's best early education while still having immediate access and frequent exposure to the wilderness.  He excellent in mathematics and science as well as a variety of sports (most notably downhill skiing) and was on a clear track to a full university scholarship when tragedy struck.  You can take the demon hunter out of Inferis but you can't keep Inferis from hunting the hunters.  It had been almost 15 years since the Ovaska's had entered Inferis and killed a demon, but it so happens that a particularly zealous ritualist had obsessed for just as long over the death of their demon.  They had hunted down his parents and on a particularly awful autumn evening broke into their home in the dead of night and deprived their bodies of their heads.  A then barely-14 Petri had been spared only because the ritualist in question had no idea the pair had a child.  If they'd known it's likely Petri would have never lived past that day either.

After that, it wasn't as though he had lost the drive to continue his studies.  It was simply that he couldn't find a proper outlet for his anger.  He'd taken to goth culture like a fish to water, and spent every moment he could trying to ditch the series of foster families he was saddled with.  If there was a habit he could pick up that would piss them off, he'd lean towards it.  He took up the electric guitar if only to play as loud as he could in the middle of the night.  And when his hunter abilities began to manifest, that rebellious spirit only strengthened as suddenly he found himself confronted with real terrors but lacked any way to learn how to deal with them.  From 14 to 18 Petri was a bit of a lost soul, jumping from city to city and family to family until finally, on the day he took majority, his last foster family had enough and kicked him out into the street.

Petri was bright and learned quickly, but without even a high school diploma and no job or family, prospects looked grim.  So in light of his utter lack of options, he enlisted with the Finnish military and had never made a better decision in his life.  Military life helped bring him back into focus, relieving some of the anger and the grief and replacing it with tasks, training, education and focus.  There was no choice to be made, he either obeyed orders and bettered himself or he was back out on the street, an option he was unwilling to take up.  He'd always been gifted with chemistry and mechanical skills and it didn't take him long at all to develop a niche as an explosives expert, diving deeper into chemistry, engineering and construction than he ever had as a civilian.  If something needed blowing up, he was the go to guy, and along the way he managed to earn a degree in chemical engineering.  Indeed, he was head hunted by groups interested in acquiring his talents for weapons research and development, but Petri instead always opted to remain on active deployments, preferring to learn about new explosives and techniques and use them in the field than to simply devote his time solely to developing them.  He needed a balance and he found it.

While he honed his mind on education, experimentation and EXPLOSIONS, he honed his body with a rigorous and constant study of hand to hand combat.  His body became a weapon, a point of focus, although he never was able to overcome the part of himself that couldn't help but throw itself into the emotion of the moment when fighting, even just sparring with a friendly opponent.  Those were the years he spent remembering how to ask questions, how to listen and learn and do, those were the years when we finally came to terms with the death of his parents.  And as the years passed he found himself increasingly in leadership roles, directing small groups of tactical operatives to conduct targeted demolitions or as part of a larger team as the expert on improvised explosives.  As time moved on however he found his thoughts turning back to Inferis and the terrible creatures he found there.  Given his curiosity and desire for knowledge, it's only natural that he became increasingly disenchanted with the military life, which curiously enough also coincided with a fateful mission his group had been assigned to in Irkutsk.  A conservative activist group had been discovered planning to bomb a scientific convention in the city and Petri's team had been chosen as part of the coalition group to ensure no explosives interrupted the conference.

What they discovered instead was that the place had already been rigged, and despite his best efforts, several explosions rocked the facility.  A madcap race out of the now dangerous building led Petri to literally smack into a scientist from the convention trying to get out of the building.  It was a strange and tense meeting until she began recounting the physics explaining where the sounds were coming from and how unlikely the building was to come down on their heads any time soon…and he liked her immediately.  The stream of consciousness recounting of details, the curiosity…they just made sense to him.  And he felt a sort of unaccountable peace around her.  The rest of the details of the event all blurred together for him, and somehow he soon found himself living with her in Irkutsk and had never been happier or more content in his life.

Nowadays he makes his living (on the books) as a demolitions consultant, but the reality is that he and his girlfriend are working diligently to create technology to give demon hunters like themselves a leg up in Inferis.  And of course, since that day life has never had a dull moment!


FACTION:
Nephilim/Kira Unterberger

REAL-LIFE SKILLS:
+ Chemical Prodigy: In spite of having no official collegiate training, he is a natural when it comes to chemistry as a whole and has developed a somewhat encyclopedic knowledge of a wide variety of chemical topics.  This allows him to quickly size up what materials are and how best to neutralize them, utilize them or destroy them.

+ Well Built: Petri has the body of a boxer for a very good reason.  Constant training in hand to hand combat has made him extremely potent as a fighter with a body to back it up.  He's strong, quick and reads opponent's motions extremely well.

+ Demolition Man: If it can be taken down, chances are Petri can figure out how.  Having spent years either locating charges to diffuse or making and placing them himself, as long as he has the time and the right materials?  No building is going to stand up to his efforts.

+ Tactician: His years spent directing a team means he knows how to lead in military situations and is able to direct reasonably sized groups of soldiers to effectively accomplish goals.

INFERIS SKILLS:
+ Blood Rage: In unarmed combat while in Inferis, Petri's strength increases by a factor of five to ten.  Depending on how aggressively he needs to fight, his strength improves to match (up to a limit).  Unfortunately, this skill has a downside…

+ Inspirational Presence: When not fighting hand to hand, Petri exudes an aura of confidence and calm.  Those around him are clearer headed and more focused, and generally much more effective working in groups.

+ Infernal Chemistry: Training with Kira has given Petri a complex understanding of the chemical vulnerabilities of demons.  If he doesn't know the type?  Usually still good at making a first guess about what they might be weak to.  If he does?  Chances are he already knows what hazardous materials to use to take them down.

WEAKNESSES:
+ When his adrenaline gets going he tends to become increasingly uncontrollable.  The only things that calm him down are Kira or time out of combat.
+ He can seem too reserved and come across to others as boring, when really he's just more interested in asking about them than talking himself.
+ Kira - his desire to protect her can be overriding.

COLOURS:
Petri speaks Finnish (goldenrod), Russian (seagreen), English (gainsboro) and Demon (firebrick).

TRIVIA:

- Sometimes forgets what language he's speaking when he's sleepy.
- Is extremely fond of asian food.
- Has slightly better than perfect vision.
- Still love to ski whenever he gets the chance.





Sharing the DM madness since 2013

ALIAS:
Irik

OTHER CHARACTERS:
Etreven, Emily Loizeau, Metatron

ROLEPLAY HISTORY:
Too long?

FACECLAIM:

Code:

[b]Hajime Isayama/Shingeki no Kyoujin[/b] :: [b]Irvin Smith[/b]

CUSTOM RANK:
EXPLOSIONS!

APPROVED

Just be careful with the Infernal Chemistry, ok? But Kira is literally bouncing off the walls.