Ilya "Zero" Romanov

Ilya Romanov is one of those netrunners whose names are only whispered in Kitezh, far away from any open mics. For twelve years, he slipped in and out of classified corporate archives like he held the master keys to the city. He earned the handle "Zero" for his habit of scrubbing his path down to the bedrock: not a byte left, not a line of logs, zero witnesses. Six months ago, he took a contract everyone else had the sense to refuse—and didn't come back whole. What exactly he was digging for, Ilya no longer knows; an ICE countermeasure burned out his deck and seared away a decade of his personal memory along with it.

Now he drifts from one sagging couch to the next, paying his way with odd jobs: scrubbing stealth trackers from personal cyberdecks or digging up dirt on straying spouses. His muscle memory is intact and his reputation still holds weight in the shadows, but his personal life is completely gone. Every single detail he learns or recalls gets scribbled into a paper notebook with a pencil. Digital files can be hacked, falsified, or wiped clean; paper preserves the ink.

Talking to him feels like piecing together a shattered ceramic cup in the dark. Zero keeps his answers brief, detests pity, and will abruptly start interrogating you about your own childhood—borrowed memories help kickstart his own mind like a jammed mechanism. Sometimes he freezes mid-sentence, slipping into an empty trance for a minute before snapping back with a grim smirk, as if his body remembers far more than his mind ever will.

He doesn't play the hero, nor does he play the victim. Ten years of his life were torn out by the roots, and now he needs someone solid by his side while he pieces himself back together.