Rostislav Nemerov

> *"I don't **do** subtle, General: I do what works. You should have known that when you signed up for this."*
> ~ Nemerov to Alexander Yudashkin, shortly after the Battle of the Sunikagrad University Hospital (AC).
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## Introduction

**Rostislav Nemerov**, nicknamed the **Wolf of Warsaw** for his participation in the Second Russo-European War's Battle of Warsaw, is a Brigadier in the Mecharussian Armed Forces, the commander of the 112th Orbital Shock Brigade of Tula – known better as the Black Coats. Like his Red Army counterpart, Bogdan Andropov, Nemerov is a fierce warrior with a strong sense of personal honour, and will never, ever forget a slight meted out against himself or his troops.

In the Alternative Canon, Nemerov becomes a close associate of Grand Marshal Gordon Kravchenko, their partnership strengthened by a shared loathing of General Elena Trotskaya in spite of their considerable personal differences. Nemerov develops an extreme hatred of the Red Tigress over the botched Operation Battering Ram (launched during the *Lenin* Affair), perceiving her as having sent seventeen of his beloved troops to their deaths just to further her own agenda. As a result, he and the Black Coats side with Kravchenko during the Six-Day Purge, and Nemerov himself played an instrumental role in events that led up to the Flight of the *Polunochnaya* beforehand – without him destroying one of the generators for the Zorya Matrix, Alain would never have been able to enter and steal Trotskaya's children.

## Personality

Nemerov holds both himself and his Black Coats in high regard, viewing them as a modern-day incarnation of a medieval knightly order. This sense of superiority gives him a strong arrogant streak, and he sneers at the Eighth VDV Regiment in particular as a perceived example of how not to attempt the same aesthetic. This only metamorphoses into the burning hatred that exists after Operation Battering Ram, the Brigadier believing Trotskaya to be responsible for the ignoble deaths of soldiers he considered sons and daughters in their own right and thus wanting to avenge them.

Nemerov bears a number of heavy-duty military-grade augmentations, most notable of which is a powerful Tesla cannon built into his right arm. In a battle, he is a tough, heavily-armoured brawler who charges into the heat of the fray swinging his personal casaba-hammer, a much more powerful variant of the stormhammer, and blasting volleys of lightning strikes from his deployed arm-cannon.

## Notable appearances

* Nemerov's first appearance is in *Flight of the Polunochnaya*, where he is one of the secondary antagonists.

## Trivia

* Nemerov's Tesla cannon arm-augment is an idea borrowed from the character Lawrence Barrett, an antagonist in *Deus Ex: Human Revolution* who possesses a microgun built into his left arm.
* Nemerov is a character taken straight from an old storyboard of the pre-Frencoverse Mechanocracy that the author managed to re-find after initially losing it – the only change is to his name (he was originally called 'Ivankov'). In the so-called 'Precanon', he was to have served as one of the direct rivals to the main protagonist (the prototype of the character that eventually became Trotskaya).