* OOC Name: TNTD
* IC Name:  Zoë Deschamps
* SteamID:

Character's Age: 25

*How does your character get their stockpile: Though Zoë sometimes jokingly refers to her stock as her "clerical errors", not all of it comes from her syndicate's contacts in FN Herstal, Nexter Industries and Heckler & Koch or the quartermasters in several nation's army logistics groups that supply them with intentionally misplaced shipments of weaponry and other surplus. Much of it is bought second-hand from rebel groups throughout Africa and the Middle-East and a small percentage is procured through fronts posing as legitimate weapon shops based in more gun-tolerant countries.
This supply is routed through a nondescript port in Croatia, passing through Serbia and Romania across clandestine roads and past unscrupulous border guards before it finally enters Ukraine, where it is delivered into the Zone by way of several small corridors where military patrols are lax and the morals of those that perform the patrols even laxer. The bribes that are paid during the transport as significant in number but not in size, as all of these nations are some of the poorest and most administratively corrupt in Europe.
What affiliations does your character have: Zoë belongs to a syndicate primarily centered around the Mediterranean coast which makes its profits selling various black market goods across the Balkans, France, Italy, Spain, Morocco and Tunisia. They also supply arms to various rebel groups in the Middle East and Central Africa. While they formerly had a presence in Eastern Europe, most of it was export-oriented; the new possibility in profits by selling arms in the Zone being one that rests on new and thus distrusted contacts.
*Do you understand that being a trader means you are held to a higher standard: A trader is always a front and a font of RP possibilities, serving not just as a way for the server to get shiny new weapons but also opportunities to act out their characters. It's a responsibility I am well familiar with.

*Do you understand that hoarding rubles will be punished: The amount of money Zoë possesses means nothing to me OOCly. She served as a trader on previous servers, and spent most of her money there handing out jobs and reinjecting the money back into the economy.

*Do you understand you must craft events and jobs: As much as I like sitting behind counters, this is the main reason I wanted to reapply for trader. Creating job opportunities is fun work, even if I don't get to enjoy them myself.

*Brief backstory of character:  The middle daughter of three belonging to a low-income household in Marseille, the chances of Zoë becoming an upstanding member of the community had always been close to zero. Her family struggled to remain fed and clothed as her native French father eked out a miserable existence doing accounting for a supermarket and her Ukrainian-born mother fought to balance raising her children with trying to augment her husband's basic income by performing dead-end jobs. They were not necessarily neglected, but their family's obvious stress at trying to keep afloat had an impact on her and her sisters, one that most of them carried with them for the rest of their lives.
A poor start to life, one that Zoë botched even further by falling into a delinquent peer group at a young age. They spent their time playing truant and performing petty vandalism and thievery to keep themselves entertained and their fellow scum impressed, a few of their more vicious acts getting several of Zoë's friends sent to juvenile hall. It was these friends and her own frustrations at her station that kept Zoë unable to keep up her academics, despite the talent for mathematics and the more administrative classes that she managed to sit through during her irregular education.
Zoë's first taste of success came from an unlikely avenue, one that ruined most of her so-called friends while giving the girl a way out of her family's entrenched poverty. Her peers turned to drugs at a worryingly young age, and though Zoë was also swept up in the brief solace they offered from her worries, she discovered a more tangible way to utilise them to escape her situation. At first peddling the little supply of low-grade weed and XTC that she had until she could get in contact with her supplier's supplier, making a case for her growing business to those who'd listen and sending the underlings she started to employ to harass those who wouldn't.
Over the years, her business expanded in supply as well as size, slowly growing out of the drug trade and into arms instead as she started strengthening ties with Algerian and Tunisian gangs operating around Marseille. It was at this time that the growth of her operation aroused the curiosity of her current employers, who opted to employ the woman rather than stamp out her smoothly-running business. Being put into contact with such a large network of suppliers and dealers turned Zoë's business into a reliable mid-range supplier and firmly put her out of the financial situation her parents mired in.
Yet Zoë, despite her current wealth, never grew out of the rapacious greed that her upbringing instilled on her. Her quick ascent in the syndicate hierarchy had come to a sudden halt, and despite the comfortable life she and her family now enjoyed, still craved more. When the first stories of the Zone's wealth -and the curious treasures within it- reached the world, both her employers and Zoë herself were immediately interested. While the group was intending to recruit new blood around the Zone of Exclusion and lease their wares to them for resale, a handful of their more adventurous employees, Zoë included, offered to make the foray into that unknown market themselves. Though her grasp on the language that her mother spoke was idiosyncratic at best, she was a familiar face to her employers, and thus more easy to trust with the money invested in the foray than any stranger, no matter how close they lived to the Zone or how much of a powerbase they had already built.
And so she came to enter the Zone. After orientating herself and operating briefly as a freelance trader, Zoë quickly came to identify the center of the artifact trade that she was tasked to gain a foothold in: the Ecologist faction. Gaining an appointment with the lead scientist was trivial; convincing him that her wares would make his team all the more effective at doing their business even more so. She was offered a spot in the bunker to hawk her wares, keeping her close to the main procurer of a large fraction of the Zone's artifacts. The deal that got her in the bunker said little about these items, but terms could always be renegotiated later..