THE GREAT GAME

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THE GREAT GAME
NIKOLAI DANTE CREATED BY ROBBIE MORRISON & SIMON FRASER
THE STORY SO FAR...
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that Dante intercepted; Konstantin, the eldest, with the
power to generate fusion energy; Lulu, creator of alldevouring cybernetic entities; Viktor, whose powers remain
unknown; Andreas, who can generate projectile blades;
and finally Nastasia, the “Romanov bitch”, who can
produce lethal poisons and acids. Dante also discovered
that he was a child born of Dmitri Romanov and legendary
pirate-queen Katarina Dante… but not born out of love.
Perhaps needing relaxation after the strains of
Rudinshtein, Dante next made his way to the famed Hotel
Yalta, where he appears to have financed a life of extreme
pleasure by acting as a mysterious masked thief –
however, even here, Dante met his match in the seductive
Contessa de Winter, a thief even more able than he.
Returning to Moscow for a lavish party at the Tsar’s
palace, Dante was again embroiled in an assassination
plot, this time leading to the death of Jena’s fencing
master, and again hardening her heart against Dante,
who by now was clearly falling for her.
During his second mission for the Romanov family,
Dante travelled to the gulag-world of Samovar, as a
bodyguard to the Lady Khara. It soon transpired that Khara
was more than she seemed – in fact, she was from another
race and planet entirely. Khara’s people were vastly more
technologically advanced than humanity, but had split
into pro- and anti-human factions. Khara’s faction, on the
side of humanity, had made a deal with the Romanovs
– the Weapons Crest technology for a steady supply of
human genetic material, delivered to them via the gulag.
During this mission, Dante successfully killed a “White
Army Reiver”, a high-tech soldier allied to the anti-human
alien faction; in recognition of this (and a night together),
Khara gave Dante the Huntsman 5000, an immensely
powerful and unerringly accurate
genetically encoded
rifle. When Khara returned to her own people, Dante made
his way back to the Romanov Palace…
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IT WAS IN THE YEAR OF THE TSAR 2666 AD WHEN NIKOLAI
DANTE FIRST APPEARED IN THE IMPERIAL COURT OF
VLADIMIR THE CONQUEROR – on trial as a thief. But in
his wisdom the Tsar elected to spare Dante’s life, and
recruited him into the Imperial Raven Corps, under the
direct command of his daughter, Jena Makarov.
Dante’s first mission as a Raven had unpredictable
results. Tasked to recover a crashed spacecraft belonging
to the Romanov family – a powerful and mysterious
dynasty, which had long been locked in a powerplay with
the Makarovs – he became “bio-bonded” to a sentient
device known as a “Weapons Crest”.
The effects of this Crest became immediately apparent
as Jena and Dante were attacked by two members of
the Romanov family; twins Aleksandr and Aleksandra.
These Romanovs manifested bizarre powers, including
imperviousness to bullets and nano-weaponry produced
directly from the body, before melding into a single superbeing. Dante, however, countered this with biologically
produced blades extruded from his hands, slaying the
Romanovs… and in the process he discovered his own
heritage as a half-breed Romanov.
Dante typically “researched” his past by marching
directly into the Romanov Winter Palace, where a
showdown with Dmitri Romanov (head of the dynasty),
Jena Makarov, and the Tsar himself led to Dante reembracing his “family”… and entering their service. He
also survived an assassination attempt by the wife of
Count Pyre, the Tsar’s personal bodyguard, but at the cost
of her life – making Pyre an enemy for the rest of his life.
Dante acquitted himself well on his first adventure as
a Romanov, ridding the city of Rudinshtein from a vicious
band of thugs, addicted to the proscribed drug “Chert”.
During this mission, Dante encountered several other
members of the Romanov family – Arkady, the youngest
son, who had been destined to receive the Weapons Crest
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THE TROUBLE WITH ARBATOVS
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Script: Robbie Morrison
Art: Simon Fraser
Colours: Alison Kirkpatrick
Letters: Annie Parkhouse
Originally published in 2000 AD Prog 1083
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