Aris Korolenko*

[Tesseract†]

Name: Aris Korolenko
Gender: Male
Age: 18
Grade: 12th [Senior]
School: Aurora High School
Hobbies and Interests:  Aris has a habit of whimsically moving from one hobby to the next, but his main interests are writing, reading (including comics and manga), watching television, history, the Internet, tennis, and people-watching. He is a member of the Book Club and Boy's Tennis Team.

Appearance: Aris is an attractive young man, standing at a respectable 6'2 and weighing about 185  lbs at any given time. His build is gangly and mostly free from fat, so that his light musculature can be seen rather clearly. He's fair-skinned and tans well in the summer, when he often spends time outside on long walks or reading. His hair is a soft golden color and curly, usually kept at medium length, though a few rogue strands sometimes curl down into his eyes. He has a good complexion nowadays, but used to suffer from mild acne.

His facial features are sharp, from the shape of his nose to his cheekbones, lending him a sullen and slightly gaunt appearance. His eyes are bright green but Aris suffers from a general lack of expression, making it difficult to read his emotions, and the zealous spark you might expect to find in his gaze is absent.

He has a piercing in his left ear that has begun to heal from disuse; besides that, he has no tattoos or other distinguishing marks, including any noteworthy scars. His taste in fashion is nothing extravagant, usually extending to a stylish t-shirt with sleeves varying seasonally, jeans or shorts and a pair of Converse shoes. He can frequently be seen with a pair of headphones or earbuds, listening to whatever band he's into at the time, though usually his tastes fall under the electronic, hard or indy rock genres.

Biography: Aris was born on March 28th, 1993 to his loving parents Mikhail and Khloe Korolenko. His father's parents were refugees from the Soviet Union, while his mother's paternal side has its distant roots in Greece. Mikhail came from a modest background whereas Khloe's father was the (relatively) wealthy CEO of a home video distributor. As the story goes, the two met during university and "fell in love at first sight," albeit Aris is convinced that his sibling's conception had more to do with their marriage than romantic clichés. He has a brother one year older than him, Theo, who has recently enrolled in WSU and is studying to become an architect.

Khloe Korolenko was a grade school teacher, pairing her love of children with a passion for history. Once her children were born, however, she became a housewife. Mikhail, on the other hand, clawed his way up the corporate ladder to become a supervisor at a pharmaceutical company. Unfortunately, his job was one ripe for relocation, and the family rarely spent more than a year or so in any one town before moving. That fact alone has defined much of the person that Aris has become.

Aris' relationship with his parents is fairly lukewarm. When he was younger he felt some deal of resentment towards his father, but since has realized that he is just as much a victim as Aris himself. Nevertheless, he has always been closer to his mother, because while she is a housewife his father spends most of his day in an office building. He is very supportive of his mother's social life and earlier on in high school worried that she was becoming a shut-in.

He has coped surprisingly well with his incapacity to build long-lasting social bonds. While somewhat withdrawn, since moving to Seattle he has begun to come out of his shell. He also taught himself over time how to manipulate his surroundings and the people in them to better slip past the radar. This habit began early on in middle school, when bullies started to flock towards Aris. He presented the perfect target: a new kid on the block that knew no one who would protect him and lacked the social skills to reach out for help. The first few times he butted heads, he told an adult or ignored them. In the former case, they usually received a slap on the wrist as punishment, and eventually the bullying escalated until it reached a point of physical violence. Even then, many people in Aris' situation would gnash their teeth and wait for the next move, but beneath the withdrawal and difficulty growing close to others, Aris does not have a meek personality. Eventually, he taught himself the rudiments of self-defense (or, at least, convinced himself that he needed to fight back) and his tormentors left in search of easier prey.

Throughout his strenuous elementary school life, however, he put genuine effort into befriending his classmates, until the pain of abandoning his nascent friendships cultivated his apathy. His mindset at the time was something along the lines of I'm just going to move away, so why bother?

Eventually, in the summer interval between his freshmen and sophomore year, his father's job took them to Seattle. At the time, the move promised to be identical to any of their others, but the pharmaceutical company reassured them that this would be a semi-permanent assignment and that they could set down their roots without fear of being spirited away across the country at a moment's notice. Despite that promise, Aris kept up his usual routine throughout tenth grade, constantly anticipating the phone call or e-mail or letter that would one day arrive and have them packing their bags and hunting online for cheap housing in some backwater halfway across the country. When that didn't happen, however, he realized that he could abandon his reclusive lifestyle.

In his junior year, Aris began the slow process of coming out of his shell. He joined the two clubs he is still presently a member of and even opened up to his small circle of pre-existing friends, joining them in outings and even the occasional party. He is still slow to befriend others, but once he does he is revealed as surprisingly charismatic and fun to be around, if somewhat eccentric.

Aris was raised in an unreligious household, despite both of his parents having backgrounds with the Orthodox Church. They simply didn't have the time, and once Khloe Korolenko became a housewife following the births of her two children, she simply didn't see the need. Accordingly, Aris describes himself as agnostic. Both of his parents have taken a mild stance as far as immersing Aris in their families' cultures. Mikhail fostered a fierce passion for the United States in his youth and, after being brought up on stories of communist Russia's cruelty, has never felt the urge to delve into his own background, whereas Aris' Greek roots can be seen in his name, his love of baklava, and his fascination with the history and mythology of ancient Greece.

Aris has indifferent relationships with his family. His parents are both busy people, his mother first as a schoolteacher and then with her burgeoning social life once they arrived in Seattle. He was never very close to his brother, as despite the small gap in their age they both had radically different interests. Theo adapted to their constant moves by befriending everyone and caring about very few of them, so that he could simply leave them behind and start new relationships at his next school. Aris is not close to his relatives outside of his immediate family and has only seen most of his cousins a handful of times, and the majority of his grandparents are dead or living overseas. His grandfather anticipated that the financial security of his home video distributor would begin to waver near the onset of the new millennium and so decided to retire, selling the business early enough that he has since coasted easily.

Outside of his family, Aris keeps many acquaintances and few real friends. Many of the former group believe that they are close to him, but Aris' upbringing has given him problems with 'letting people in.' It takes a lot of effort and a great deal of time before Aris will grow close to someone. There are no particular cliques he avoids or dislikes, but thugs and overly headstrong jocks do irritate him because of his past experiences with them.

Aris' old lifestyle reflects on his psyche, as well. He is very whimsical, attaching himself to an activity or interest, sustaining himself on information about it for awhile, before finding something else that intrigues him and repeating the cycle. His more fleeting pursuits run the gamut from astronomy to zoology and back again, as oftentimes he will come back to these hobbies after some time to refresh himself on them. Like most people, his interests cannot be encapsulated in a few words; he plays video games, listens to music, and so on, but not enough for them to be called hobbies compared to his greater passions.

Prior to moving to Washington, Aris spent much of his time in his room, reading everything from fantasy fiction to textbooks. His thirst for knowledge has existed from a very early age. His love of reading naturally progressed into writing, first in journals and diaries and later online; most of his work consists of unrelated short stories, but there have been a few poems and half-baked attempts at longer fiction.

He doesn't watch television as much as he used to, but he has always been fond of documentaries and police procedurals. He also admits to watching anime, although he treats it more like a guilty pleasure, and likes to consider himself a connoisseur while avoiding a handful of more well-known series that he believes give the subculture a bad name.

His passion for history, particularly ancient history, has also been a lifelong dedication. When he was a child, too early to understand the significance, his mother Khloe regaled him with tales of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. His bookshelves at home are lined with chronologies of the ancient civilizations' long and distant histories, and he prides himself on a complete collection of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon.

Aris has also maintained an online presence since early on in his adolescence. He used it to both keep in touch with and meet new friends, and indeed, some of the people closest to Aris are those he has never met in real life. He frequently posts on a variety of discussion forums and message boards for online writing and in the past has gone so far as to moderate several.

Early on, his parents decided that to help keep Aris physically active they wanted him to start playing a sport. It wasn't long before Aris decided that it would have to be tennis: it offered a way for him to satisfy his parents without needing to get overly close or physical with anyone his age. At first, he felt that playing was a chore, but over time he grew to enjoy the game. He's been playing since age thirteen, and while by no means a prodigy, he is quite skilled.

He has also always had a fascination with people and the way they think. He enjoys observing them, and when he was younger did so out of necessity (or so he thought); by emulating certain behaviors he could avoid unwanted attention and skirt by unnoticed. While in the past he used his observational talent to dodge the spotlight, he has started to use it as an advantage in making friends and avoiding enemies.

In the past, Aris' academic performance was just above average. He did the minimum that he thought necessary to pass without drawing any attention to himself; since realizing that he would most likely finish out high school at Aurora, however, he has put more effort into his studies and works to his full potential, performing excellently across the board, though particularly in English.

Lastly, because of the fact that he has never had time to build many solid relationships, Aris is very new to romance. He's never had anything but brief flings and spurts of attraction, and has never had to face his own sexuality, making it very new and very intimidating territory for him.

Advantages: Aris knows a little about a lot of things and would call himself intelligent. He's also, as has been mentioned, good at noticing behaviors in others and adapting to them, a talent he might use to forge alliances (or break them) if given the opportunity. Besides these advantages, he's also agile from playing tennis.
Disadvantages: Aris has a lot of difficulty getting close to others and trusting them; one of the results of this is that he doesn't have many friends at Aurora High, and the ones he does have probably have closer friends of their own, considering Aris has only been in town for a few years. It's very probable that he will be on his own for most of the game.