Andreov

Anders Szaro, almost always known by his stage name Andreov, is a human male planeswalker from the plane of Ravnica. Andreov is an accomplished performer, playwright, and satirist, whose illustrious career in Ravnican street theater was cut short when pressure from the Orzhov Syndicate drove him into creative stagnation, alcoholism, and crushing debt. After escaping the bailiffs by igniting his planeswalker spark, Andreov has spent the last several years wandering the multiverse in various states of sobriety, seeking inspiration and enjoying the artistic second wind he's gained from so many new worlds and ideas.

Pre-spark
Andreov was born on Tin Street in Ravnica's Tenth District. Both of his parents were street performers, and he soon joined them for shows, but, where they dazzled audiences with feats of acrobatics, his talent was rhetoric. His stories often drew crowds, and he often persuaded his friends to participate for a cut of the profits, putting on short improvised farces and staged duels of wordplay for the entertainment of passers-by.

As soon as Andreov was old enough to strike out on his own, he joined the Slate Street Pragmatics, a small, highly experimental street theatre troupe. His time in the Pragmatics was short, only a couple of years, but formative - it was here that Andreov met his future fiancée, actress Yula Rina, and his promoter and closest confidante, Narvi.

Viva Cotanora!
Andreov's initial visit to the island nation of Cotanora, on the plane of Sandaca, was merely the latest in a long line of multi-week drinking benders across the planes. One night, at a street party hosted by the revolutionary group known as the Joiners, he staggered up onto an improvised pedestal and performed a surprisingly coherent improvised one-man play poking fun at some of what he'd seen in his time on Cotanora. The performance impressed Jimena Cantes, the leader of the Joiners and an accomplished telepath, who arranged to meet him and soon enlisted him as her chief propagandist.

After a few unsuccessful attempts at rallying support through street theatre, Andreov turned his attention to the Joiners' poster campaigns. Noting that they lacked a unifying message or a hook to draw people in, he and Jimena co-designed Gatizo, a cartoon mascot for the movement. Each designer, unbeknownst to the other, infused Gatizo with a little magical power to help him stick in people's minds and encourage them to spread the message; perhaps due to this, he was an overnight success, and support for the Joiners surged.

This success soon drew the attention of President Sebasteo, who sent squads of his presidential guard to "reason with" Andreov; this had little effect, however, as he outwitted and humiliated them in their attempts to arrest him. The story made it into some of Cotanora's less reputable newspapers and drew the attention of Potter Olenbarg, a local business magnate and eccentric; while Jimena's attempts to recruit Potter and his Roaches to the Joiners' cause were unsuccessful, he and Andreov became fast friends.

(growing success plus growing fear of Gatizo)

Tensions grew between Andreov and Jimena, and, after a disastrous argument over the Joiners' swelling membership and Andreov voicing his fears of Gatizo's future, Jimena dismissed Andreov. Driven underground, he found himself mingling with Cotanora's sprawling organised crime network, and wisely stayed neutral when both Cacillo and Cojo attempted to recruit him. A secret party Andreov attended at Potter Olenbarg's estate turned into a riot fuelled by ostensible Joiner support, but Andreov and Potter both saw the truth: these people didn't stand for any Joiner core values, instead serving only Gatizo. Andreov also realised that Jimena, too, had fallen under the cat's influence.

The presidential guard impounded Potter's estate, and he and Andreov found themselves on the streets of a city that was spiralling into utter chaos. Realising that they were missing their chance, the advance parties from Vancare and Leos hastily launched their own coup attempts, but both groups' leaderships had been partially undermined by Gatizo and further chaos and infighting ensued. Seeking refuge at the Cantes household, they found Jimena's sister Rosatta and her mother and tracked Jimena herself to the Joiners' old headquarters above the Dead Whale inn; her mother, out of touch with popular culture and thus unaffected by Joiner propaganda, eventually managed to free her from Gatizo's influence.

The group split up: Potter and Rosatta headed out into the streets with a handful of loyal Joiners and Roaches, hoping to rally those uncorrupted by Gatizo to resist the revolution, while Andreov and Jimena worked through the night and the following day to produce a counter-message that would discredit Gatizo, reasoning that the only way to destroy a fundamentally populist being was to make it unpopular. Jimena first tried to transmit the message telepathically to her allies across the city, with instructions to pass it on, but Gatizo's presence was producing too much static for this to be effective.

The sun set on Cotanora, and Sebasteo, seeing that the unrest had not dissipated as he'd hoped, sent in the demon-trafficking mercenaries of the Hellion Brigade to clear the streets. Andreov exploited the crime families' fear of being destroyed in the Brigade's indiscriminate crackdown (as they hadn't been paid off as much of the presidential guard had) to commandeer some of their resources. Using the printing equipment that Cojo's Worms were using to forge documents, he and Jimena mass-produced thousands of flyers with their counter-message on it and worked with Cacillo's Sharks to find the best secret paths through the city, to distribute them without getting caught in the violence.

Dozens of "paper bombs", bundles of flyers released from rooftops, were detonated across Cotanora, and the counter-message began to spread. The Joiners were among the first to rally, and harnessed their momentum to defeat most of the Hellion Brigade in a savage street fight with help from Olenbarg's Roaches, but the foreign powers, disciplined and cut off from the general public, proved harder to reach. Vancare got lucky, as Rosatta and the subtle Architects sabotaged their scripture such that the chaplains began disseminating the message, but the Leoc forces remained Gatizo's final bastion on Cotanora.

As the emboldened Joiners, Roaches, and Architects, finally united as Jimena had dreamed of with her at their head, marched on the presidential estate with the covert backing of Cacillo and Cojo, Andreov fought his way to the Leoc embassy and confronted a diplomat on the top floor who had become Gatizo's nexus on Cotanora. At first he reprimanded Gatizo for straying so far from his original message, but, realising that what Gatizo stood for was no longer his decision to make, he instead allowed it to enter his own mind and willed it to be forgotten from Cotanora's collective unconscious. As far as he was aware, it worked, though he did fall unconscious from the strain.

Andreov awoke in the Cantes family's spare bedroom, Jimena having sensed his plight and sent one of her brothers to fetch him. The estate had fallen while he'd been out: Sebasteo was missing, presumed dead, the Joiners had recalled the long-forgotten Cotanoran Congress to sit once more, and a better future was on its way for Cotanora. Rosatta arrived soon after and offered him the chance to join the new government they were forming as an advisor, but Andreov refused. He'd had quite enough of propaganda; it was time to go back to an art form he knew and trusted. And he knew exactly where he had to do it.

Appearance
Andreov is a brown human man in his forties, though he looks about a decade older. Though out of shape, he carries himself with force and purpose. His thick shock of hair and short full-face beard are entirely white and impeccably clean, if scruffy.

Andreov dresses almost entirely in shades of red; his favorite look is a dark red tuxedo jacket over a pale red shirt and a bright red triangular kerchief around his neck. His satchel is always at his side, stuffed to bursting with papers and kept shut with several enchanted buckles. He wears a plain silver engagement ring on his left hand, to remind him of the love he left behind on Ravnica.

Powers and Abilities
Andreov, as a rule, never carries weapons. For him, the pen is quite literally mightier than the sword. With a writing implement - anything will do, but he prefers a classic quill pen - he can sketch conjured minions into being with a few confident strokes. These minions are always exagerrated cartoon versions of whatever they're drawn to resemble, and they don't last very long, but they're very real for a few minutes and can do very real damage.

Andreov is also known for his magical wordplay. The world is his stage, and he can speak all manner of low-level trickery into being. He can induce pratfalls, throw stage punches that hit like sledgehammers, and (one of his favourite tricks) hurl insults that cause actual physical pain - his words can't cause deadly harm, though, and he wouldn't want them to even if they could. It's unclear whether the puns that accompany these special effects are an essential part of the magic or just Andreov being Andreov.

Even beyond his magical abilities, though, Andreov is a consummate master of all things theatrical. He's an excellent director and a good (though not exceptional) actor, but what sets him apart from most other Ravnican directors is his writing skill. He's very much a pantser, and claims to have written most of his best-known plays in long uninterrupted bursts over just a few days. He's best known for his wickedly sharp satirical comedies, but has explored all sorts of genres, and has yet to find one he can't turn his hand to.