Korben Wentiko

Korben Wentiko is a character role-played by TenguHangover.

Background
Korben is a mysterious young man who has a large tattoo covering most of his face and neck. He usually wears a bandana around his mouth to hide the tattoo. He typically has a loud mouth and is quick to insult people or tear apart their stances and views. At other times he is the exact opposite, and is silent, but watchful.

He mostly tells people he originally moved to the city in search of work, applying for an EMS position where he was eventually denied. The true reason he moved, or where he came from seems to constantly change depending on who asks him. Within a few short days he very quickly went from a typical hockey fan from Massachusetts to a dark and brooding enigma of a person, most of which he attributes to finding a special floppy disk in an abandoned building. Where or why is also never explained but he seems to have an odd and uncharacteristic affinity for technology. He claims his white hair is actually natural and is due to an electrical incident in the past.

He is almost never seen working, and generally prefers to leech off of those around him or seems content to just exist. He convinced Jerry Callow to lend him $3000 for the half payment of his van, and is almost always low on money or supplies. Encounters with Korben are a tossup depending on the mood he is in. He can be nice, aggressively bitter, gloomy or even a bit unstable. He has been beat, strangled, stabbed and shot throughout his time in the city and is no stranger to committing acts of violence. He almost always carries a knife which he commonly referred to as ritualistic, this is unknown to actually be true though. He generally goes along with people's ideas or plans, even if it may result in great personal injury to himself or incur the wrath of the law as long as he finds the person somewhat amicable.

His hatred of cops has only grown as he believes they constantly attempt to slight him more than help him when he needs it. Interactions with police have resulted in a multitude of petty charges such as jaywalking or bicycle offenses, and has generally been mistreated by the police when taken as a hostage for robberies. He has also had numerous violent interactions with the old HOA, and recruited a local mental patient into trying to destroy or otherwise attack them.

In numerous hostage situations, his constant gloomy attitude has made his abductors develop Lima Syndrome, becoming sympathetic with his plights in life as a whole and have offered rides back or dividends on the robbery. In general he has a knack for making people pity him. Whether this is intentional or not, or a trap, is unknown.

Korben Rising
Eventually he hunted after numerous people professing to be involved with the occult or some other form of paranormal activity, stalking and attacking them. Ryan Carthus was the only one he left alone, instead constantly receiving tarot readings in an attempt to decipher if Ryan had an actual ability from beyond, but to also see if Ryan was able to perceive anything within Korben himself.

He has proclaimed himself a Cyber Satanist, and prophesized an alternative to simulation theory, where Satan was actually a functioning computer or program running on a computer and in all of it's connections to the overall mass media infrastructure of the world: It hears, sees and knows all. He believed the floppy disk he found contained a program that would connect to Satan and return a random generation of jumbled ASCII characters that he could decipher. He also started trying to obtain more computer parts so that he may make the machine stronger. His inability to correctly prophesize the day and general shortcomings in life led him to become aggravated and impatient with it all.

His facial tattoo was explained only to a psychotic man as the final mark of the 13 Blessings, a group he considered himself to be involved in because of the Cyber Satanism, the reality of which isn't very accurate. Supposedly it was a death face that only those he intends to attack with his knife should ever see, which is why he wears a mask to hide it. To most people though he either says something completely different every time, or explains that he doesn't know what it is, and just woke up with it one day.

13 Deaths
Korben had left the city for a while to return home for some unknown reason. Upon returning his appearance and demeanor had remained mostly the same, however he doesn't seem to recall his previous journey in the city. His last name of Pasternak was also changed to his true last name, Wentiko, which is another way to say wendigo, a type of cryptid. He feels he was drawn back to the city for some reason and states he returned because his cryptozoologist parents were killed in a dark heavily forested area of the Appalachians. No bodies were ever found, save some unidentifiable bloody scraps. This is another event in which he constantly tells people a different story. It is possible almost everything about him and everything he has done in the city has been a running series of lies. He now claims to be a member of the 13 Deaths, similar to the 13 Blessings he had previously talked about, likely to have been the case the entire time.