Masters of Death

The Beginning & The End

Vladimir Piotr Galkin was born 2 months premature in an underground clinic in Wisconsin that mainly catered to illegal immigrants.

His mother Griselda, A Russian maid working in a mansion on the other side of town, had slept with her employer as a way of earning more money to pay for food and her daughter's education, not expecting the resulting affair to produce anything more than a hopefully stable boost in income, and being born before he should have been, the medical costs for tiny Vladimir's birth drained what little she had.

Tatiana, 5 years old and already trying to be a grown up for an exhausted mother after Papa had an accidentat work (he was fatally shot after playing informant to the police, but she would never know that), was left to care for her baby brother alone most days. The neighbors were helpful, giving her food from their leftovers and the occasional baby supply, but they were just as poor as she was and they couldn't do much more.
As the days passed and the already too small child grew weaker, Tatiana knew she had to do something. She knew that his papa lived in the big house mama worked in, and that he had lots of money. Maybe he could help?

With as tired as she was, still recovering from a stressful birth and the malnutrition caused by saving most of the food for Tatiana, Griselda never noticed the little girl and swaddled bundle tailing after her when she left for work the next day.

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Jonathan Masters was old, he lived alone in a mansion passed down from his father's dairy business days, had little in the way of friends, and mainly interacted with people when he wanted something. He may have been old and alone, but he wasn't stupid or blind. The maid he had been having sex with had gotten pregnant, and though having done her obvious best to hide said fact, a baby is eventually startlingly obvious when said person is naked beneath you. He didn't say anything however, and neither did she, and one day the woman came back into work after a weeks leave looking so tired and missing the growing mound of her stomach that he reached the conclusion that the child had been lost. If his calculations were correct, a few months before they would have entered the world.

This... upset Jonathan somewhat. He had presumed that eventually he would be 'made aware' that he had fathered a child and had started minor preparations for taking care of said child. There was a room not far from his own emptied and locked as a possible bedroom, a small set aside beginning of a savings account, toys from his own childhood found in the attic... but he had not accounted for his chance at staving off loneliness to slip through his fingers so quickly. You cannot miss what you never had, but Jonathan thought he might miss this child that never was regardless.

So when a little girl holding a bundle of worn blankets and a pleading look on her face stumbled into his back yard as he was returning from pondering this by the fish pond, and told him that the ball of blankets was his son, and that she was his big sister and to 'please help I don't know what i'm doing wrong', he caved almost instantly.

3 weeks later, before he could sort out a custody agreement but after making sure his son was healthy again, Griselda Galkin died after finally collapsing in her kitchen having overextended herself just that little bit too far over the last few months, and the children were his alone.

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Vladimir and Tatiana Masters grew up in the mansion and knew every nook of it by heart, so it wasn't all that surprising when they both claimed to have met a dairy obsessed ghost that Jonathan had to assume was his father.
He had no doubt in them, having experienced odd occurrences himself, but he couldn't help being a little bit exasperated when a 13 year old Vlad (with Tatiana fresh off to college to learn medicine with a specialisation in pediatrics, bless her heart) told him that he wanted to build ghost detecting machines and prove their existence to others.

Being the kind of man he was though, Jonathan simply pointed him in the direction of engineering, biology, chemistry and physics, and told him he had a long road ahead of him. Neither disagreeing or agreeing with his decision but showing him the way to achieve it anyway.

Of course, it was only a few years later, having seen Tatiana graduate and work herself into the ground frantically trying to figure out what was wrong with a hospitalised comatose Vladimir following the disaster of a ghost portal experiment, that he wondered if he had made the right decision.

When his son died in his hospital bed without ever waking up, after 2 years of desperately hoping, he knew he had made the wrong one.

...When his son woke up 5 minutes after flatlining, sister splayed across his chest sobbing, still without a heartbeat but unquestionably alive, and so very confused, he didn't know anymore.