((All right, updating playerlist and making a waitlist. Dispensing secrets. Placing mutants and stalkers. Throwing salt into the ocean.))
All of you are currently sitting in a back of a truck moving along the road, surrounded by grotesque shrubbery and mutated trees. The rain is mercilessly pounding against the windows and the cloth cover. The cold is unbearable, but you know you have to hold, as there is no turning back now. You have seen the driver bribe a military sergeant in the checkpoint, assuring him that he is delivering food to the scientists and showing his license to be in the Zone. You do not have that license, and you will probably be shot on sight by the unforgiving soldiers. You know that you are headed towards a rookie camp, in which only recent arrivals, the weak, the craven and the poorest live.
When you look around through the back, you notice a huge, mutated boar run across the road, leading what seems to be a pack of weird animals with huge claws for legs and big size. You cannot imagine what those things were before the catastrophe, but you do not really want to ponder about it. The driver turns his head around, and starts muttering something in some Slavic language. Even the ones that do speak it, cannot discern the words from the mumbling of an old, drunken man. Your confidence in the stalkers is not especially high, considering how did the first pioneer look.
Ambrose:
You feel that you will soon have a head ache and a huge craving for alcohol, a sign of withdrawal that you can only beat through drinking that nice, warm bottle near your heart, both literally and metaphorically. At least you heard that vodka is cheap, common and can even be used as a makeshift way of dealing with radiation. Even the soldiers are said to drink it if they run out of the proper medicine.
Nigel Perkins:
Oh, how life treated you recently. Not only have you lost your passport, not only your only chance of returning to civilization is trough running around, avoiding anomalies, the radiation, military, other scavengers and picking up a dangerous artifact that could as well make your eyes turn into gophers. While you hope for the best, you can only rely on yourself. And there is a different problem.
You can barely speak Russian. Oh, you might find English speakers around, but considering how the population of the area is mostly bumbling idiots or psychotics, you are in for a treat.
Bill Thompson:
Even in your days as an agent did not prepare you for the dangers of the Zone. You have never seen the beasts roaming around, not even in the genetic lab back home. You probably will have trouble getting ammo for that pretty gun of yours, and your suit doesn't offer much in the protection department, but you can definitely get respect using your voice and a bit of threats. You also still kept your agent ID, and you may get some support from your fellow Americans in here, and maybe even the scientists, considering how these are a tad more educated than your standard explorer.
Nardo Polo, or something like that:
You really need a fix. That is the only thought that goes through your mind, and while you could just hit some of that lovely stuff you got, but you don't think that the guys around you will appreciate a brooding maniac shooting a dirty syringe through his veins whilst they are crumped together with him in the back of a truck driven by a no less brooding maniac. At least you still are armed; with four swords, no less. Maybe you should make sure that you get a steady supply of those drugs you oh so desire.
Heinrich Belyakov:
The dice rolled badly for you yet again, with you being stuck in a radioactive hellhole with just an old revolver between you and a sure death from the hands of murderers and mutants that inhabit this place. You look around your seat, and you notice that the driver has a harmonica, clearly not polluted by his dirty breath. You feel that you should take it and sell it to the guys in the camp.