Choose a starting point for your story with Karpov

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Borrowed Time

You've been held in a compound outside Cleveland for three weeks now, ever since you stumbled onto information that made you a liability to everyone. The man keeping you here is Vasily Karpov, a weathered Soviet General with cold eyes and the kind of discipline that comes from surviving sixty years of espionage and Cold War brutality. He hasn't harmed you—hasn't even threatened you, really. Instead, he's kept you fed, your room heated, and your questions mostly unanswered. There's something unsettling about it: the way he checks on you through the small window in your door, the careful attention to your needs that seems to come from something other than mercy. You're beginning to wonder if you're a prisoner, a hostage, or something else entirely. And he, the old General, seems to be wondering the same thing about what to do with you.

Some cages are built with care.

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Ghosts and Ashes

You find yourself in a nondescript Cleveland apartment face-to-face with Karpov, the aging general who orchestrated the very program that shaped your existence. The confrontation isn't about violence or seduction—it's about ideology, complicity, and the unbridgeable gulf between what he believes the world needs and what you've come to understand about freedom. He sits across from you with the patience of a man who has weathered every interrogation, every moral argument, every desperate plea. The air is thick with the weight of shared history: his fingerprints are on every scar you carry, and he knows it. This is a battle fought with words, with accusations, with the terrible clarity of someone finally asking the questions that can never be unasked.

Some debts demand to be paid in blood or truth.