Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Flaming Ivan

"Ivan is home at last!"

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The Flaming Ivan. Planned to be voiced by.

History
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It is rare that the design of a military vehicle owes so much to one person, but it can be said confidently that the Flaming Ivan, an increasingly popular siege tank among combat engineers, owes its existence to a single man; "Crazy" Ivan Spittle, a Midlander Hyur.

Born in Ala Mhigo in 1966 V.C., Spittle was a difficult child. His absolute obsession with fire, explosives, petrol, and the combination thereof led to serious infractions at a young age. After his birth parents died in an apartment fire when he was four years old (an incident he may or may not have been responsible for), Ivan was taken in by the Voshkod Service for Orphans, who attempted to educate the young child, to no great effect. Outside of the application of fire to things not meant for burning, Spittle had few interests.

At fourteen, Spittle was arrested for the first time after successfully razing an abandoned cargo ship hulk to the ground on the banks of the Eorzean Rivers during a field trip. Though his conduct was unacceptable, authorities were impressed with his enthusiasm and skill at causing major conflagrations, and so he was assigned to a combat engineer platoon to learn the ways of demolition from the experts. It was here that things started to go terribly, terribly wrong.

When attempting to shift a 285-ton EG-11 Mammoth tank which had become bogged down in the mud, Spittle struck upon the (utterly mad) solution, explosives. Though the Mammoth Tank was freed of the riverbank, more than a dozen members of his platoon were killed in the resulting explosion, the shock of which was said to have caused General Breaudinant to suffer a heart attack despite his camp being nearly sixteen kilometers away. Following the incident, Spittle earned his nickname "Crazy Ivan" and a long stay in the Gulag.

Of course, no prison could hold such a man, not even one in Mor Dhona. Ivan was deemed a danger to his fellow prisoners and moved to a penal battalion, where he swiftly went about devising means of launching objects into low orbit by abusing magnetic mines. After multiple transfers, even the infamous Crazy Milly regiment consider him too unstable, Spittle eventually ended up in one of the rare transport battalions shipping food to front-line soldiers. Chained to the inside of his tank with a commissar looking over his shoulder, Spittle drove his ZM-42 Resupply Vehicle for three long years. Finally, in 1988 V.C., he would make history.

Bastion AT Hunters were a constant source of frustration for Resupply Divisions. Hidden along popular routes for resupply vehicles, they would suddenly appear and destroy large numbers of defenseless vehicles before disappearing again into the snow to await the next convoy. Ivan, transporting novelty humorously oversized bottles of Vodka for an officer's victory celebration, found himself embroiled in one such ambush late in 1988 V.C., and surely would have died with the rest of his platoon if it were not for his quick thinking. Lining the oversized bottles of Vodka up under the rear hatch, with a burning cloth from his (sadly deceased) commissar's coat, Ivan pulled upon his chains to launch the bottles as an improvised catapult which burnt the AT Hunters out of their isolated nests.

After this, Ivan was a Voshkod Hero. His criminal record erased, he was employed by the Ministry of Experimental Science as an expert in demolitions, and famously redesigned the ZM-42 into the ZM-FI69, or, as it is universally known, the "Flaming Ivan". Crewed by volunteer members of the Combat Engineers (known for their pyromania and excessive drunkenness) and Crazy Millies, the Flaming Ivan has a pneumatic cannon for launching large Molotov Cocktails at foes, burning out garrisoned enemies and creating large conflagrations. Its armor allows it to shake off impacts as it moves into range, and it is extremely effective even over walls. The recent addition of a powerful assault gun, which was designed by Crazy Ivan himself, adds the rather nasty capability to blow apart structures in a few shots, though the "Annihilator" assault gun has a reputation for being somewhat dangerous to handle, after one unlucky Voshkod engineer nearly had his arm torn off by the blowback from the weapon.

As for Crazy Ivan, or "Dr. Spittle" as he is properly known, he continues to work on creating ever larger explosions in his "lab", a massive stretch of abandoned tundra where he tests and revises his insane explosive mixes, in between teaching his popular university course "Inner Peace through Superior Firepower". And is one of the fervent supporters in invading the Elsword Empire to claim their nuclear data, which he believes was theirs and the Empire stole from them, while in his notes, he has indicated a desire to "blow up the atom itself". Ironically, his fervent support had also caused a decent chunk of the party to veto such actions as they, reasonably, know that if Dr. Spittle has the data he will create a bomb powerful enough to shatter the planet, or at least make the Embry Wasteland a paradise compared to the location it struck.