Vincent Volaju

Vincent is a tall, imposing figure standing well over six feet, with black hair and grey eyes set into a gaunt, haunted face. His design draws on the looks of musicians Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan, while his overall image takes further cues from the actor Vincent Gallo.

Vincent moves through the world wrapped in nihilism and gloom. The Titan War and the experiments performed on him shattered his grip on what is real, leaving him to view existence itself as a form of purgatory, a limbo of endless suffering. That bleak outlook curdles into a drive to end all the pain he perceives, even if doing so means dragging everyone else down with him. He frequently frames the wider world as the party that is truly insane, insisting that the line between sanity and madness is one each person draws for himself.

Volaju endured a lonely childhood before being conscripted into the Mars Army in 2060 and joining its Special Operations Forces two years later. During the Titan War his unit was secretly dosed with weaponized nano-machines that ravaged the brain and nervous system before dissolving into undetectable proteins that mimicked lymphocytes. An experimental countermeasure in his blood let him survive, but it stripped away his memories, including his love for Elektra Ovirowa, leaving him only recollections of combat and pain. From then on he struggled to separate dreams from waking life and was plagued by visions of glowing yellow butterflies, a hallmark of the virus. Declared dead in 2068, he set out to escape what he saw as a false reality, reclaim his lost past, and take the rest of humanity with him.

In 2071 he launched his assault on Alba City. Recruiting the teenage hacker Lee Sampson to gather resources, he loaded a stolen tanker with the nanomachines and detonated it on the freeway, seeding the virus among the victims before vanishing after spotting Faye Valentine's craft trailing him. He arranged to conceal more of the agent inside Halloween parade floats, then disposed of Sampson once the hacker had outlived his usefulness. When Faye tracked him to his apartment, he overpowered her, passed some of his blood to her through a forced kiss, and, rather than kill her, told her his story and invited her to survive the coming purge. She refused, and he departed.

Shaking off Elektra's surveillance, Vincent boarded a train where he clashed with Spike Spiegel, besting him in brutal hand-to-hand combat and nearly dropping him to his death before a grenade unleashed still more of the virus. The final confrontation came at a replica of the Eiffel Tower, the bridge to his imagined heaven, where he triggered the infected parade floats over the city. As the disease at last overtook him and he moved to finish Spike, Elektra appeared, and this time he remembered her and hesitated. She did not, gunning him down. Dying, he recalled that the only real days of his life had been the ones spent with her, having searched for a way out of his nightmare while already awake.