KSI Ivan

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Ivan, of Ivan and Terrence fame, is Freddie's best friend. Together with Ivan they form a sort of straight man/funny man duo, with Ivan being something a cloud co-colander. He never quite seems to be "there" but will constantly come in at a clutch moment with something to say. Whether its relevant or solves the problem remains to be seen.

Backstory

Like Freddie, Ivan is an orphan, though with very different circumstances. His mother was fifty-three when he was born, and his father was 69. He has has no siblings and his parents had managed to out-live any of their own kin. They had never planned on having any children and had even been told they couldn't. It was a fact they accepted until Ivan's birth. His father died when he was only four, leaving his then fifty-seven year-old mother to raise him alone.

Both of his parents were well-educated, with six PH.D.s between them (his mother holding four and his father two). The two worked together as university professors. Their very-much not child-friendly house was filled to the brim with books, journals, research materials, and artifacts, which Ivan grew up playing with like toys. Instead of a rattle, he had a dinosaur fossil.

After his father's death, his mother brought Ivan to work; but with the university's daycare being across the campus (effectively several miles away), grieving mother and grieving child did not wish to be too far apart. So Ivan was left to play in his mother's office, adjacent to a lecture hall and to a research library. When needed, she had various aides to keep him from getting into too much trouble. As he got older, rather than send him to school, she home-schooled him between lectures and even frequently had him sit in on other university classes. However, his mother never followed any set curriculum, and Ivan's schooling would be described as "haphazzard, at best".

He did not attend a formal educational program until highschool, at which point he was enrolled in an on-campus program that blended university classes with highschool classes. This is where he met Terrance: not as classmates, but during a field trip. By sophomore year, Ivan had transferred to a public highschool. Despite her rather lofty titles, Ivan's mother never made any complaints about his choices or educational aspirations, citing that it was more important for him to desire to continue learning than to demonstrate high marks. Besides, she had enough sway to get him into a good school even if all he had was a GED.

Instead, Ivan enrolled at CTI with Terrance, where, in addition to the school's required curriculum and his environmental design courses, he taught himself programming and electrical engineering. Ivan was always a fastidious skill collector and knowledge collector.

When Ivan was twenty-four, his mother (then aged seventy-eighty) passed away.

Job

Ivan is officially an Environmental Modeler and Texture Artist for SomethingSoft. Unofficially, he helps out now and then on their coding, and does tweaks and fixes to a variety of pieces on any game. He also does some IT work for the company, and for six months actually succeeded in drawing two pay checks by pretending to be a separate computer technician (this was accomplished by wearing a pair of fake glasses and a mustache: a disguise that worked substantially longer than it should have).

When SomethingSoft downsized and moved to a strip-mall, Ivan became the company's official unofficial IT lead, based on his qualificiations of being "that guy who knows how to wire a network jack". He was quite annoyed at not being paid extra, but at that point they had only nineteen employees in the office.