unvariable | INFO.

BASIC INFO

NAME:	Alan Zaveri
CANON:	Russian Doll
PULLPOINT:	EP 6; just before the mirrors disappear
AGE:	Early 30s
HOUSING:	Housing
PLAYER:	reggiemantle / gabbie#9039

FIRST GLANCE

APPEARANCE:	LINK
HEIGHT:	6'1"
BUILD:	Very fit
HAIR:	Black, short, kinky; cut into a fade
EYES:	Brown
DRESS:	Slightly preppy/nerdy, but otherwise average and clean-cut; button-down dress shirts, mostly neutral colors, sweaters, khakis, hoodies, sneakers
VOICE:	LINK
DEMEANOR:	Uptight, (in)tense, awkward, compulsive, thoughtful, kind, (over)sensitive

PERMISSIONS

BACKTAGGING:	✔
4TH-WALLING:	✘
THREADJACKING:	✔
MIND-READING:	✔
FIGHTING:	✔
ROMANCE:	✔
INJURY:	✔
KILLING:	✔
⇉ FULL PERMISSIONS ⇇

ONCE UPON A TIME,
there was a very special boy named Alan.

"Nadia & Alan | Running Up That Hill" (Watch on YouTube)

CW: Russian Doll is a narrative that revolves heavily around death, trauma, and mental illness. In Alan's case,
this also significantly includes suicide. This will come up throughout his history and personality sections.
PERSONALITY

Alan is not an intimidating person, but he is not a particularly approachable one, either. By default he is polite and tends to keep to himself, too caught up in his own head and with checking all the boxes in his day-to-day rituals to make a strong impression on most people beyond "aloof," "compulsive," and/or "intense," even at his most mild-mannered.

He doesn't mean to be, but uptight structure and rituals are Alan's strategy for dealing with the pervasive stress and depression he's been living with, his attempt to keep pushing forward on his own until the unhappiness simply goes away. He's still a sweet, well-intentioned person, a bit judgmental sometimes though not overly so, but he struggles to relate to people-- not for lack of interest, and not just because he's a bit socially awkward, but because their emotions and internal lives are difficult for him to see past the filter of his own mind, the chaos in his head that utterly opposes the order in his demeanor and that he tries to instill into his life. He depersonalizes, overlooks things, doesn't always pick up on subtle (or not-so-subtle) social and emotional cues, and sometimes willfully avoids pulling threads he knows might unravel.

This doesn't mean he's not empathetic, however, nor does it mean he's altogether passive. Despite how fastidious he can be and how put-together he can seem, those closest to him -- Beatrice, Ferran, and now Nadia -- know how much turmoil goes on beneath the surface that Alan rarely ever acknowledges, let alone lets out constructively, giving him a bit of a second-hand reputation as Beatrice's "crazy boyfriend" to Mike (likely not her words, but rather Mike's own assessment of Alan, both blind and after meeting him). Aside from his quiet intensity, stubborn neuroses, and neurotic stubbornness, Alan can be extremely aggressive or confrontational when pushed past a certain point, when he's upset or when he's been drinking, and often this can include public arguments and lashing out, sometimes breaking things or throwing punches. He internalizes negative emotions to an alarming degree, so he has a lot of built up anger and depression inside him that might take some provoking to draw out, but then will overtake him instantly and explode outward in some form or another, against the target of his anger or against himself.

Alan theorizes that these loops are, as he put it, a "purgatorial punishment," but he also affirms that he doesn't consider himself a bad person, which is a contradiction even Nadia points out-- why is he the one being punished, then, when someone like Mike gets to have his cake and eat it too? It's a subtle but telling insight; obviously Alan is a troubled person, one who we know struggles with feeling broken and empty but who tries to do good to make up for that feeling, so why might he think he was a bad person? Depression and intrusive thoughts likely wouldn't help, but the answer is probably even more simple than that: his mind went to purgatory and punishment because his original death was a suicide. He claims not to remember it at first, but that may have been a lie -- after all, he only tells Nadia after he kills himself a second time, when they're reconciling and finally realizing how much they really need each other, and he still only tells her about the first time -- or, if he did repress the memory, it could easily still have been subconsciously influencing his line of logic.

Either possibility could follow, because fear of failure does weigh very heavily on Alan. While his narrative more directly deals with how he compulsively internalizes these feelings and indulges in self-destructive coping mechanisms rather than address them, there are also one or two occasions in which he lies about something by telling someone what they want to hear, such as when he tells his mother that Beatrice accepted his proposal, or when he tells Nadia's friend Lizzy that Nadia thinks very highly of her potential for motherhood (whether of dogs or of children or both is unclear) despite a previous incident that Lizzy was still upset over. Usually when he thinks it will make someone happier and "fix" things, in other words.

In either case, it also doesn't matter, because whether deliberately or not, this inability to ask for help is one of Alan's major fatal flaws, preventing him from ever really making progress or moving forward-- quite literally. As Beatrice tells Alan, she still wants to do so much, and all he seems to want is to stay the same; he falls into the trap of routine and complacency, not because that is actually what he wants, necessarily, but because it's safe, because he wanted to believe that if he kept his head down and kept working hard and going through the motions, things would eventually work out and he'd finally be happy. This is, of course, particularly counterproductive in Alan's case, when "going through the motions" and recreating his day means hurting himself again and again, in both the same way and in new ones, but also why his growth is so significant. Part of what helps free them from the loops is when Alan decides that he needs to make things right with Beatrice and forgive her rather than endlessly keep up the cycle that's been hurting them both, meaning he and Nadia were both right about what was causing and fueling the loops, just each of them only halfway there on their own.

Alan is both deeply obsessive and deeply compulsive, but given how he favors and is comforted by routine, if he does have OCD, he seems to have found a way to live with and manage it for the most part functionally. Not perfectly, but functionally, although likely it can and does clash unpleasantly with the undiagnosed bipolar disorder that is implied to be the primary source of his struggling. As with Nadia's mother Lenora, the show never outright states Alan's mental illness, but the two of them are narratively paralleled and contrasted on multiple occasions through both their heavily bipolar-coded symptoms -- fervent, tireless, overwhelming manias that no one else can understand or keep up with, devastatingly persistent depressions that no one else can fix, impulsive thoughts, abrupt mood changes, the crushing terror of loneliness, and of course, high risk of suicide -- and Nadia's respective relationship with each of them. But unlike Lenora, Alan does not thrive in chaos; he makes his bed every day, he plays affirmations for success he can repeat to himself like a mantra, he waits around to open the door for an elderly gentleman who lives in his building, he plays video games before bed, he stress eats his feelings and then frantically works off the calories. He has stated that therapy, that people thinking he's crazy, is one of his greatest fears, and this very evidently manifests in his compulsion to "fix" everything, and his desperation to rigorously control and structure his life. As such he suffers more for trying to do, and fix, everything by himself, including himself, often self-medicating via binge-eating and excessive drinking, whereas Lenora both felt she was not the one that needed fixing, and expected others -- Nadia especially -- to fix life for her.

A small difference, perhaps, yet pivotal; these parallels help to inform why Alan and Nadia are connected in the first place, yet it is the differences that make up why they need each other, why only they can help make right what has gone so wrong with the other. Both have spent their lives feeling its their responsibility to fix everything, and feeling either too undeserving of help (Nadia), or too afraid of what needing help implies to ask for it (Alan). Nadia still blames herself for her mother's death, believing it happened as a result of Nadia "abandoning" her, and is now averse to letting herself be close with anyone and can't begin healing until she learns to forgive herself and let other people in; Alan feels broken and empty, more terrified of being alone with that feeling, with his own thoughts and potential failures, than of going through the motions pretending he's okay, and can't begin healing until he learns how to move on from what's causing him pain and let other people help him. Both push people away, if not necessarily intentionally, and yet both still end up changing each other's lives by helping the other realize sometimes you can trust other people to help and protect you; that sometimes everybody needs that to be truly whole, because no one can do everything on their own.

HISTORY

Russian Doll is set in modern day NYC, in a world effectively identical to our own... more or less. What does that mean? Yes, it does appear to be identical to our own world, except for the fact that two people -- Nadia Vulvokov and Alan Zaveri -- after both dying on the same night, find themselves caught in a connected time loop where they relive that same night over and over, resetting each time to the exact same moment after many more subsequent deaths. This night in particular is significant to both of them: it's Nadia's 36th birthday, the same age that her mother died (of implied suicide), and also the night Alan himself commits suicide.

Nadia is the protagonist, so the narrative primarily follows her experiences, perspectives, and background; Alan is introduced in the fourth episode to complement and ultimately help complete her story (rather, they complement and complete each other's), so in comparison, not much is known about Alan's life. We don't know what his job is, nor much about his relationships with his family -- he has a living mother, a presumably still-living father, and siblings -- or even a lot about his respective relationships with his best friend Ferran or his (ex-)girlfriend Beatrice, but unlike Nadia, who's current problems stem mostly from childhood trauma and how she has been coping with it, Alan's issues stem mostly from his mental illness, and particularly how it's affecting him in the present.

Alan lives alone in a very orderly, minimalistically decorated apartment with his pet fish Boba Fett. His mother is a doctor, his college (and seemingly only) friend Ferran works at a deli, and his girlfriend Beatrice is pursuing her phD in literature. She has also been cheating on Alan with her professor, Mike Kershaw, and was gearing to break up with Alan the night the loops begin, the same night Alan was planning to propose. That first night Alan then proceeded to get extremely drunk, miserably stop by Ferran's deli where he accidentally broke a few jars (spotted by Nadia during her own first loop, though neither of them realize it at the time), then proceeded to give his belongings away to a group of homeless people in the park on his way home, where he finished the night off by jumping off the roof and killing himself.

And then of course, he came back.

Alan was in his bathroom again, getting ready to go away on a trip with Beatrice and propose to her, and Alan, being neurotically ritualistic and a chronic "fixer," did it all again. Not the suicide, but everything else; he went back to Beatrice's with his ring, he endured being broken up with again and again, time after time, dying and then coming back to do it all over, presumably thinking that maybe one time it would be different, that he could change Beatrice's mind and the cycle would finally end.

He and Nadia encounter each other again on the eve of their 11th loop, in a malfunctioning elevator. Their meeting is brief, but revelatory: "Didn't you get the news? We're about to die," says Nadia, as the elevator begins to plummet. "It doesn't matter, I die all the time," says Alan, to which Nadia responds: "Me too."

From that point on, everything changes.

At first, Alan doesn't like it. Suddenly his routine has been thrown off, and though it's a routine in which he's been repeatedly leading himself back into the same painful place, reopening the same wounds, the belief that he was more in control since he knew what was coming every time gave him a bit of strange, shallow comfort. Routine, even when it hurts, gives his life order, and he likes order, but this variable in particular disorients him immensely. He's so distracted that on his next visit to Beatrice's, their conversation plays out just differently enough that he finds out about her affair with Mike this time, something which he is very unhappy to learn, so when Nadia tracks him down, he's initially reluctant to have anything to do with her. He proceeds to unburden some of his troubles while trying to explain his misgivings, but Nadia, more preoccupied with getting to the "what," "how," and "whys" of their situation, brushes his hesitance off, simply telling him to meet at her birthday party the next time they loop. That night, after aggressively confronting Mike in his office, Alan dies again while getting rid of his engagement ring, and is relieved rather than concerned when he finds that during the next loop, while he does still have the ring box, this time it's empty.

Alan and Nadia spend the next several loops trying to reconnect either at her party or sometimes outside Alan's apartment, and in the process slowly begin to uncover new facts about their predicament, such as that they appear to have died the same amount of times, and also seem to be dying each time at the same time. Alan confesses that he believes this is some sort of purgatorial punishment, and in response Nadia makes a big, public point of asking her party guests to tell her if she's a bad person in order to prove his theory wrong. Trying to further make the point to Alan that she's not a bad person, during many of these loops Nadia also goes off with her ex, John Reyes, in an effort to make something right with him that she'd never followed through on before. After discovering that Mike's a guest at Nadia's party, Alan stays preoccupied re-confronting him several more times, but he and Nadia both come away from these encounters feeling worse instead of better, with no more answers than when they began.

When eventually Alan mentions he doesn't remember his first death, Nadia becomes convinced this must be a key piece to their puzzle, one of the few "unknowns" they can actually pinpoint. Nadia introduces Alan to Ruth, the woman who effectively raised Nadia when Nadia's own mother wasn't capable of doing so herself (so, most of the time), who also happens to be a therapist. Despite Alan's phobia of therapy, he hears Ruth out as she explains the significance of reflection, why Nadia's mother Lenora had impulsively broken all the mirrors in the house once, because without another pair of eyes to validate their existence, without a witness, something that sees them, everyone can only stumble around in the dark, unreliable narrators to their own experiences-- that reflections are grounding. Alan (big fan of mirrors!) agrees to try it, although the therapy ends up unsuccessful for reasons we never find out in further detail. They then make the plan to try recreating Alan's first loop, Nadia following him along through his original routine, but things derail just slightly when she can't keep quiet while Beatrice is breaking up with him. She interjects a few times, a bit snidely but in Alan's defense, which of course makes Beatrice angry but is cathartic to Alan, cheering him up. Their next stop is the bar to get as shit-faced as Alan had been that night, and during their efforts, Nadia tells Alan a bit more about her mother, he rants angrily about Mike, she admits she fucked Mike on the night of her first loop, Alan challenges that he could fuck her better than Mike did, and... well.

The morning after, Nadia sneaks out with Alan's shoes to give them to Horse, a homeless man in the park who she's met many times during many loops previously, and knows will otherwise freeze to death since his own shoes have been stolen. She and Horse stop by Ferran's deli, where Horse dropping some food reminds Nadia that she saw Alan there during their first loop. When she returns home she finds that while looking for his shoes, Alan has not only cleaned her entire apartment, but also put out photos of her and her mother that she had been keeping underneath her bed, so rather than explain her newest discovery about their connection, she gets furious over having her stuff touched and privacy violated and kicks him out. Alan goes home, dejected, and -- perhaps unwittingly -- falls into a similar despondency as on his first night, and ends up once again on his roof. Elsewhere, Nadia chokes to death on a chicken bone.

This time when she comes back, Nadia finds her reflection has disappeared-- all the mirrors are gone, suggesting that obviously, something has gone terribly wrong. This will be Alan's canon point.

ABILITIES

TEMPORAL GLITCHING ( opt-ins )
In Alan's own world, he and Nadia are currently trapped in a cycle of dying and then "resetting" to the same starting point, so that they then relive the same night (and as many days following they manage to survive) from that same moment following each death. This also effectively "resets" any events that may occur from that night onward each time, as well as people's memories, ala the film Groundhog Day. Alan and Nadia call each cycle a loop, and Nadia (being a programmer) goes on to refer to whatever is causing these loops as a "code." Normally these loops run their course more or less consistently, but Nadia and Alan discover that there are certain variables that can start to break the code, causing strange timeline incongruities, and animals, objects, and even people to start disappearing in subsequent loops. You know... among other bad shit.

Naturally, by virtue of not being in his own world, this "code" is going to break even further, creating an effect on Alan in-game that will function as one of his powers. While Alan will still be bound, in a way, by this cycle, his loops obviously can't function in RP the same way they would in canon. The way this will work instead is:
He will still be somewhat more prone to accidental death (or near death) than the average person. Since characters in-game resurrect after dying, if he dies in-game he will "reset" three minutes before what would be his official moment of death as opposed to after the fact, before his body or the nanites would actually register him as dead, so that in most cases there would be no need for actual resurrection or a port-out. Anything that would cause instant death will be an exception to this, and go through the regular character death procedures.

Whenever this happens he'll be returned to his home bathroom, 36 minutes in the past. This will operate by normal time travel logic for the environment and for NPCs, but imPorts will generally be immune, meaning they will not forget any interactions they may have had with Alan in that span of time unless the player wants them to (basically if they opt-in for that or if we've plotted beforehand), and it will instead just cause weird jarring glitch in the matrix-style incongruities and game canon "continuity errors." If other characters happen to die with him at the time, players can also opt-in to having them reset 36 minutes in the past, in their own bathrooms, but they will be affected by the same conditions/limitations, and also by the following consequence.

After each loop Alan will forget something. Most commonly it will be something from the current/previous day, possibly minor (such as what he had for breakfast that morning), or something extremely significant about himself or his life (such as why he and his ex-girlfriend broke up). In some cases he will be able to tell that he's forgotten something, and in others he might not even notice. The frequency and also manner of death will have some impact on what kind of memory gets lost, so he is unlikely to lose anything too important unless he dies a lot, or if he kills himself.

( CW: SUICIDE ) His suicide(s) in canon broke things real bad, so of course were it to happen again here, said breakage will continue. If he kills himself, he will immediately lose an important memory about himself and/or his regular life. Suicide in particular will also always operate by regular in-game death rules, meaning he will be ported out any time it occurs successfully. I'm not expecting this to happen often, if at all, but for obvious reasons it feels necessary to include.

Other things that can/may happen include but are not limited to:
things he's accumulated will start to disappear (pets, furniture, etc.)
hallucinating "ghosts" representative of his trauma (not unlike the one Nadia saw of her childhood self in canon) that, when seen, will act as a bad omen and cause him to die on the spot
whatever wounds he acquires through any of his deaths may stop consistently "resetting" whenever he does, heal more slowly/spontaneously reopen, or outright scar permanently
in some cases (opt-in), other imPorts may start being affected by his power the way normally only NPCs are (forgetting interactions that occurred within the 36 minute reset period, or even forgetting how they know him altogether)
sleeping may begin to glitch/roll back/affect his CR in other ways, erasing or rewriting moments, events, or conversations, but not the entire relationship
and other side effects in this vein.
While suicide would be the most immediate/fast-acting cause of this or similar breakage, it can still happen for other reasons, like as mentioned if he dies a particularly high number of times, or if other things happen that would drastically throw off the code.

However, in a situation where he dies heroically and/or selflessly, instead of losing an important memory he will instead recover one of the ones he lost prior.

He will be especially forgettable to NPCs; no matter how often he interacts with them or frequents NPC-owned establishments, they'll either not remember ever meeting him before at all, or they'll only vaguely remember one or two prior interactions.

While he'll be able to appear on camera/film just fine, his reflection won't show up in mirrors or windows. Similarly, sometimes when he gets particularly emotional, or simply the longer he is around them, mirrors and/or windows might spontaneously crack or shatter. However, if/when a Nadia is in-game, then his reflection will reappear and this bullet point will be rendered mostly void (until/unless she is no longer in-game).

To imPorts who can read minds or sense death or if/how a character has died, they will in most cases not be able to get a clear or linear reading from Alan, and instead see a jumbled amalgamation of all the different timelines and/or deaths he's experienced.
PAUSE
Alan will have the power to periodically pause time for up to 36 minutes. During this, Alan will still be able to move and interact with objects in so much as they can be interacted with, but electronics/vehicles/anything else reliant on time or motion to operate won't work as long as time is paused. Similarly, while time is paused, he can't die. If he is touching anyone while activating this power (limited to 2 other people at a time), he can bring them with him into this state of frozen time, and the same rules will apply to them.

Time will start up again automatically after 36 minutes pass, although with deliberation, he will be able to break up that time into smaller segments if he chooses -- so five minutes here, 10 minutes there, etc. -- as long as they do not exceed 36 minutes altogether. He can only use this ability once per loop.

CONDITIONAL: If/when a Nadia is in-game, she would not count toward the 2 people limit, and either be automatically brought into the pause along with Alan no matter where she is, or trigger some other sort of strange effect/time discrepancy. The specifics will obviously depend on further discussion with the player, but I'd like to include the bare bones of it now just to get the base covered!
SENSORY LINK
Alan's third power will be a joint/shared ability with Nadia (sweetbirthdaybaby).

Since while in-game they can no longer be "connected" by their loops and dying at the same time as they are in canon, instead, they will periodically connect by sharing in a sensory experience the other is having, meaning no matter where they are in relation to each other, while linked one of them will be able to feel, see, hear, taste, and/or otherwise experience what the other is. This will be more likely to occur during moments of extreme emotion or physical duress, such as getting into a fight, having a near death (or potentially near death) experience, having sex, getting drunk or high, working out, dying, and so on, but is not limited to those; they can also link up during more mundane moments and experiences, it will just be less likely to happen involuntarily. If they happen to be together while linked, other people -- NPCs and imPorts alike -- will only be able to see one of them.

(For simplicity's sake, the person having the experience firsthand will be referred to as A, the person having it secondhand will be B.)

They can't control the other person while linked, however, so any experiences they share will be in a vicarious but passive way, not one where they can affect what's happening; B can't stop A from continuing to drink or from getting into a fight (or whatever else), and likewise, B's behavior or movements won't be influenced in any particular way. They may feel (or see, or hear, etc.) whatever A is, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll know what's going on with A. The secondhand experience will also not be as strong as the actual experience, so while B could feel sore after A gets into a fight, or drunk or even hungover after A has been drinking, B wouldn't sustain any injuries A might get. This also means with time and practice they could theoretically learn ways of tuning it out if it activates unexpectedly.

The easiest way to link will be emotionally, then physically, with visually/auditorially being more difficult without a physical or emotional component triggering them as well, so it will also be possible to link in more than one capacity (e.g. emotionally/visually, physically/visually, emotionally/auditorially, emotionally/physically, etc.). While it will mostly trigger randomly in the beginning, after enough time (and some practice) they will be able to deliberately activate the link. They don't both have to be trying for it to work; whoever initiates it (B) will be put in the other one's (A) shoes in whatever manner they're trying to be (so for example, if A was missing and B was trying to find them, they could link with A to see through their eyes and try finding them that way).

EFFICIO

INFO.

⟲ LOOP COUNTER ⟲