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Description
Vlad Van Winkle is… not from around here. He is an Earthling, sure, but not from this Earth. Born in the proud nation of Taured, Vlad was a completely average man with a fiance and a minor business career. Just the kind of completely missable fellow the government would like to recruit for a… special project. In 1954, he was brought on to such a project as a sort of explorer scientist. The details were certainly dodgy, but the pay was irresistible. Vlad wanted nothing more than to give his soon-to-be wife a happy life, and that money could go a long way. For the first few weeks, nothing particularly alarming happened. He was trained to handle and navigate a variety of terrains and recognize unfamiliar languages, like an astronaut expected to encounter something unearthly… It was decent labor for good pay, and no questions were asked. Until at last, just a day before his wedding, the true experiment began. And like all experiments in these kinds of stories, it went horribly wrong.

Vlad was placed into an enormous engine of almost alien design, which was designed to rip a hole in spacetime and explore extradimensional space. Vlad was given every conceivable piece of safety equipment, and basically all of them failed. He was thrust into the infinite, where time stretches and space flows, a realm where math and physics break down into a Lovecraftian nightmare. After God knows how long, Vlad stumbled his way back out into reality. Only… it wasn't his reality. It was a parallel universe, nothing like his own. Up was right, left was blue, and purple was seven. Monsters berated him, chased him in circles until he could get his return node working. Unfortunately, damaged as it was, he was unable to return to his own universe. He simply ended up randomly in another one, different from the first but all the more insane. This happened again and again, forcing Vlad to survive for as long as possible until he could find a way home. Eventually, he did manage to find his way to a familiar universe. One with an Earth in 1954. He wound up in an airport in Japan, and tried to catch a plane home. Unfortunately, there was a hiccup. They claimed his passport was invalid, that his country didn't exist, and detained him while they investigated.

Somehow more concerned than when he was trapped in the nightmare universes, Vlad's "rescue" came in the form of a man who appeared in his room in a flash of light. Professor Cyril von Zimman was a time traveling nutcase who came to, quote, "see what was really up with a famous mystery." The Professor helped Vlad escape from custody and return to where his home was supposed to be, in a spot on the map occupied by the micronation of Andorra. Vlad found his fiance there, but she had never met him before. She was afraid of this madman claiming to be her lover, and it was then that Vlad realized he truly wasn't home at all. He was still stuck many universes away. The Professor was unable to fix his device, but he was at least able to set it to be able to return to this universe whenever he wanted. With nothing better to do, Vlad began the long road ahead, trying to find his way back to his own universe and his fiance by sheer random jumping around the multiverse. Along the way he runs into a host of strange and unusual characters from parallel worlds and alternate timelines, like his "horse", Georgie, and disturbingly, different and often criminal versions of his fiance.

Design notes, this is one of the characters that came to me in a dream, though not one nearly as clear as Dawn. He was mainly just one of those random cameo characters that in the dream it's like you've known them forever but when you wake up you're like wait who the hell was that. I did my best to copy his design from the dream. He looked like a cross between the guy from Princess Bride Doctor Strange. I swear this all happened before Multiverse of Madness was a thing please believe me- His "sword" is actually supposed to be a laser gun he picked up while trying to survive a universe full of monsters. But physics were a little wonky that day, and the gun glitched mid-fire, sticking the bolt in place and basically turning it into a lightsaber.

Anyways, in the dream, he had the personality of someone who was dark, brooding, and mysterious, but in a very self aware sort of way. Kind of like the Doctor from Doctor Who but more stiff lipped. Like I said, there wasn't exactly any plot to do with him in the dream, so I just took his ability to teleport through extradimensional spaces and extrapolated from there. As you can tell, I pretty much made him Drake Hero's interpretation of the Man from Taured, one of the more famous urban legends about a guy from a country that didn't exist slipping in and out of our universe. Vlad now serves as my deus ex machina character pretty much XD He shows up to lend a hand and provide exotic items in stories or D&D whenever something extremely big is about to go down. He's also my conduit for any multiversal or alternate history stories I may want to build upon. Drake Hero canonically isn't the only one, the one next door for example is a fantasy universe I made for a scrapped D&D campaign. But that of course is all on the fringe, so it's a story for another day.

Description
Vlad Van Winkle is… not from around here. He is an Earthling, sure, but not from this Earth. Born in the proud nation of Taured, Vlad was a completely average man with a fiance and a minor business career. Just the kind of completely missable fellow the government would like to recruit for a… special project. In 1954, he was brought on to such a project as a sort of explorer scientist. The details were certainly dodgy, but the pay was irresistible. Vlad wanted nothing more than to give his soon-to-be wife a happy life, and that money could go a long way. For the first few weeks, nothing particularly alarming happened. He was trained to handle and navigate a variety of terrains and recognize unfamiliar languages, like an astronaut expected to encounter something unearthly… It was decent labor for good pay, and no questions were asked. Until at last, just a day before his wedding, the true experiment began. And like all experiments in these kinds of stories, it went horribly wrong.

Vlad was placed into an enormous engine of almost alien design, which was designed to rip a hole in spacetime and explore extradimensional space. Vlad was given every conceivable piece of safety equipment, and basically all of them failed. He was thrust into the infinite, where time stretches and space flows, a realm where math and physics break down into a Lovecraftian nightmare. After God knows how long, Vlad stumbled his way back out into reality. Only… it wasn't his reality. It was a parallel universe, nothing like his own. Up was right, left was blue, and purple was seven. Monsters berated him, chased him in circles until he could get his return node working. Unfortunately, damaged as it was, he was unable to return to his own universe. He simply ended up randomly in another one, different from the first but all the more insane. This happened again and again, forcing Vlad to survive for as long as possible until he could find a way home. Eventually, he did manage to find his way to a familiar universe. One with an Earth in 1954. He wound up in an airport in Japan, and tried to catch a plane home. Unfortunately, there was a hiccup. They claimed his passport was invalid, that his country didn't exist, and detained him while they investigated.

Somehow more concerned than when he was trapped in the nightmare universes, Vlad's "rescue" came in the form of a man who appeared in his room in a flash of light. Professor Cyril von Zimman was a time traveling nutcase who came to, quote, "see what was really up with a famous mystery." The Professor helped Vlad escape from custody and return to where his home was supposed to be, in a spot on the map occupied by the micronation of Andorra. Vlad found his fiance there, but she had never met him before. She was afraid of this madman claiming to be her lover, and it was then that Vlad realized he truly wasn't home at all. He was still stuck many universes away. The Professor was unable to fix his device, but he was at least able to set it to be able to return to this universe whenever he wanted. With nothing better to do, Vlad began the long road ahead, trying to find his way back to his own universe and his fiance by sheer random jumping around the multiverse. Along the way he runs into a host of strange and unusual characters from parallel worlds and alternate timelines, like his "horse", Georgie, and disturbingly, different and often criminal versions of his fiance.

Design notes, this is one of the characters that came to me in a dream, though not one nearly as clear as Dawn. He was mainly just one of those random cameo characters that in the dream it's like you've known them forever but when you wake up you're like wait who the hell was that. I did my best to copy his design from the dream. He looked like a cross between the guy from Princess Bride Doctor Strange. I swear this all happened before Multiverse of Madness was a thing please believe me- His "sword" is actually supposed to be a laser gun he picked up while trying to survive a universe full of monsters. But physics were a little wonky that day, and the gun glitched mid-fire, sticking the bolt in place and basically turning it into a lightsaber.

Anyways, in the dream, he had the personality of someone who was dark, brooding, and mysterious, but in a very self aware sort of way. Kind of like the Doctor from Doctor Who but more stiff lipped. Like I said, there wasn't exactly any plot to do with him in the dream, so I just took his ability to teleport through extradimensional spaces and extrapolated from there. As you can tell, I pretty much made him Drake Hero's interpretation of the Man from Taured, one of the more famous urban legends about a guy from a country that didn't exist slipping in and out of our universe. Vlad now serves as my deus ex machina character pretty much XD He shows up to lend a hand and provide exotic items in stories or D&D whenever something extremely big is about to go down. He's also my conduit for any multiversal or alternate history stories I may want to build upon. Drake Hero canonically isn't the only one, the one next door for example is a fantasy universe I made for a scrapped D&D campaign. But that of course is all on the fringe, so it's a story for another day.