Victor Skyrabin

> "*The insolent rats which so flippantly dismissed our President as some unprofessional, ignorant negro have no respect for culture and are the same crude, crude barbarians who sit at home listening to cooking shows on radio and forcing their dog and baby to drink from the toilet.*" - Skyrabin, *The Legacy of Leftism: Reflection on My Time as Vice President to Cabell Calloway and President of the United States*, 1971
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**Victor Skyrabin** (9 March 1890 - 10 November 2002) was a Russian-American scientist, politician, and public speaker, well known in Labor circles for his encyclopedic knowledge, condescending attitude, stubbornness, and eccentricity, as well as his questionable background as an understudy of Doctor Theodore Heilbronner. Though he was orphaned at age 11, he managed to create a name for himself as the creator of the *Skyrabin Cocktail*, a form of incendiary explosive originally intended to be a medicinal beverage that could rinse the liver. The beverage quickly became popular as a working-class weapon, frequently used against police and other well-armored forces by rioters, typically striking workers. Skyrabin's name quickly became popular among Labor advocates and organizers, and Skyrabin used the momentum to catapult himself through the ranks of Labor, eventually becoming chairman of the labor party, but not without generating much controversy in the process.

Despite the opposition by many Labor officials for his considerably conservative views, Skyrabin would serve as Vice President under Cab Calloway, eventually becoming President after Calloway's survived assassination attempt and following coma.

While Skyrabin remains a controversial figure within and outside of the Labor Party, scholars consider him to be in the upper ranks of United States Presidents, with his conservative leanings being the likely reason he was able to hold office without any considerable opposition from parties generally at odds with Labor.

## Early Life

   Born Vyacheslav Skryabin in March of 1890 to two Russian immigrants, Skryabin's name was Americanized when he was just four years old, with the 'r' and 'y' being swapped due to what Skyrabin deemed a "repeated and incessant frequency of others to egregiously mispronounce the name with little to no sentiment for the propriety in which the name is to be vocalized" (a statement he wrote in his diary at only 8 years old). Though he received an education from his next door neighbor and serial tractor thief, Jippity Seven-Eyes, the quality of his learning was overall very poor. His parents were alarmed, however, by their son's rapidly maturing critical thinking skills, vastly expansive vocabulary, and frequent violent outbursts of the verbal nature; a commonly known example of this is when Skyrabin, aged only 11, claimed he was going to stuff a rag down his mother's mouth and stuff her into her purse so forcefully it would "create a new singularity, collapsing the mass of the point in which [she] was stuffed into a point of one-by-one, so that it spawns an area of zero gravity so tremendous that the light by which this world exists will be consumed into a hole of nothingness". This spurred his parents to have him committed in *Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital*, where he would meet German-American scientist Dr. Theodore Heilbronner, who was disguised as a hospital psychiatrist at the time, and inspire him to conceptualize the first instance of Black Hole Theory.

## Work Under Dr. Heilbronner

After being released from the hospital, Skyrabin found himself disowned and without anywhere to live. Reluctantly, he located Dr. Heilbronner in person, explaining his plight and asking for assistance. Heilbronner proposed Skyrabin live with him in his laboratory in Raleigh, located under a bar he used to serve unsuspecting patrons his newly concocted potions in order to find out their effects when consumed by humans. He proposed Skyrabin work as the bartender, stating that it would be of great assistance to not have to run the lab and bar at the same time. The desperate Skyrabin accepted the offer, and within no time he had moved his few belongings to Dr. Heilbronner's underground basement. It was here that Skyrabin invented his own beverage upon Heilbronner's suggestion; the beverage was volatile and known to be easily flammable and borderline undrinkable, finding widespread popularity not in bars, but among rioters and striking workers who couldn't afford to purchase high grade explosives such as dynamite or grenades. Heilbronner, in an attempt to profit off of the invention, deemed the beverage the "Skyrabin Cocktail"; while the name stuck, Heilbronner's petition for a patent on the substance was rejected, and in his already unstable emotional state, he was driven to complete madness, becoming unhealthily obsessed with impregnating a woman who could bear him a male child to "succeed his throne as the God-King of Science". This culminated in his kidnapping Skyrabin's girlfriend, Natalie Fischer, in 1908 and raping her, holding her hostage for 9 months until she gave birth to a male child (whom he named Emanuel), then forcing her to drink a test vial full of a luminescent green substance. Upon drinking it, she turned into a human caterpillar, growing several legs, antennae, scaly skin, and developing an overall caterpillar-like anatomy before her body finally gave out and she died, lying in a heap of her own goo. This led to Skyrabin and Heilbronner having a major falling out, with Skyrabin developing a major phobia of caterpillars that lasted the rest of his life. The usage of the word "caterpilling" as a term for intentionally using someone's fear against them while feigning ignorance came from a 1937 incident in which Huey Long, an inner-party opponent of Skyrabin's, ate a live caterpillar during a party conference in Raleigh before pretending to twitch uncomfortably, ripping off his jacket and throwing it over Skyrabin's head before fleeing the building while screaming, "Woah, get them off me, get them off me!", swatting at his arms and rustling his hair, pretending to be covered in caterpillars; the jacket's pockets turned out to be filled with caterpillars. Long was found thirty minutes later bragging about the incident in the very bar Skyrabin had worked at when he was serving under Dr. Heilbronner.