Ivy d' Seille is rarely thought of as a warrior, but he has spent is life fighting for causes he rarely understood. A child of the last days of the French Empire, he was raised by a polyglot collection of kitchen staff and street children in Algeria, Madagascar, Indochina, and Syria. It was the war and participation in the resistance that changed him forever from what his unknown father and distant mother were, world travelers divorced from everyday cares, into a fatalistic assassin and secret agent.
Ivy d' Seille could be best described by his closest friend Rains-a-Lot, if he was ever include to speak that much on any one subject, as a person of deep feeling masked by a layer of deeper feeling and hidden under a gallic sense of fatalistic humor. His closest comrades know him to be prone to dramatic gestures, but there is a darkness underneath that scares many around him; who ask themselves what if those gestures were directed the wrong way?
Ivy, in his short life, has lived among the bravest men and women, people who he knew faced the threat of horrible torture, life-altering mutilation, and deaths so final that their colleagues would never find what happened to them. Despite this, he soon found that the black soldiers fighting around his birthplace were the fiercest men he had ever met. They drove their tanks into a fierce line of resistance, destroying enemy positions and getting destroyed themselves. Ivy watched in wonder as the men abandoned one burning tank only to run back and climb into another, less injured vehicle, and when no tanks were left they would fire machines guns and finally small American carbines at the enemy. It was like some mighty god had infused these men with the courage of seraphim.
Ivy's weapons.
Ivy d' Seille carries two iconic weapons, although none of them are magical or particularly powerful when used in Virdea. The first is a Browning FN 35 9mm pistol. The first "latge" or "double stack" pistols, it was called in Europe the Hi-Power because it held five more rounds that most military automatics. It was John Browning's last design, completed after his death. Ivy carries it in a custom made Boyt shoulder holster.
While Ivy carries a pistol for self-defense, he prefers to use a MAS -1949 rifle. When he was fifteen he recovered one of the few prototypes of the rifle, called a MAS 1940, which was different than his later rifles in being loaded by stripper clips. Although he fought with the rifle through Vic-Sur-Seille in 1944, he was forced to trade it in for a Berthier, then after the war carried a Garand until 1950 and being issued a MAS 1949 for service in Korea and later Indochina. The MAS-1949/56 was later adopted as the standard rifle of the Company when Dustin Rhodes armorers found fault with the US Army M-14.
Ivy d' Seille was named after the town of his mother's birth, Vic Sur Seille. The Seille is a river originating in the Jura mountains in France.
French Army records show Ivy was married briefly in 1949 to a woman of Indochinese descent.
Oral histories of the 761st Tank Battalion, an all-black combat unit, describe but do not name a young French resistance fighter helping them during the engagement at Vic Sur Seille. French records of resistance members are so spotty, and Ivy himself so rarely talked about his war service, that it is almost as difficult to track his history as it is to track his partner Rains-a-Lot.
Ivy is a natural polyglot. He speaks French, English, German, Arabic, and Vietnamese. His multi-lingual background helped him in Korea where much of his unit did not speak French, and he was attached to