In honor of the new wwdits season premier, “family portrait” of my own wwdits ocs. The Brighton Beach “coven,” three that made their way out of the USSR at different times of the 20th century to settle among the Soviet diaspora in Brooklyn.
Velira was an avant-garde dancer and bought into a secret accelerationist group that turned each other in the 1920s, believing that they would live immortally in what would become a socialist utopia. When it didn’t happen, she slunk away to Paris and from there to New York. She has the special ability of becoming a shadow. “Velira” is a name she adopted in the revolutionary fervor, as many did. It’s a contraction of “великий рабочий”, “great worker.” (Her name used to be Vika, if you see earlier art of her).
Kuz’ma was the product of a wartime scientific project to create new soldiers out of maimed bodies, after the real-life research of Soviet scientist Vladimir Demikhov. He’s kept “alive” by some kind of pacemaker and wires under his skin, but by now parts of him have begun to fall away. He’s a himbo par excellence, though he can recite out Marx and Lenin like an encyclopedia. His brain is a socialist realist dream. He’s super strong, and sometimes doesn’t realize how much. He often forgets where he is or what year it is. He wandered out of the ussr after it’s collapse and defunding of the research center where he lived. Inessa found him somewhere and found him too pitiful to leave.
Inessa is a product of the late Soviet consumer goods smuggling subculture. Turned by a predatory vampire in the late 1960s while allegedly meeting a stranger who would sell her some records in what is now Odesa, she became extra jaded about everything and is devoted to hedonism, theft, and kitsch. Her special ability is shapeshifting, but she can’t change her voice. She loves twilight and wears a lot of body glitter. Despite how comfortable she claims to be as a vampire, she deeply misses the sun and often tries to go out anyway, episodes that are followed by nursing her burns and a bout of deep depression.
