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Name/Nickname: Maxwell Sutherland Kristeva (AKA Max, MK, Maxy)
Gender: Male
Birthdate/"Permanent" Story Age/Astrological Sign: March 17, 1971; thirties; Pisces
Birthplace/Current Location: Minot, North Dakota
Height: 5'9"
Weight/Body Type: Average; lean/fit
Eyes: Gray (shade varies)
Hair: Medium brown; short
Race/Ethnic Background: Caucasian; European-American, Bulgarian ancestry (father's side)
Relationship Status: Remarried (Natalie Kristeva, wife); various previous relationships, including with Reginald Boomgaard, Danielle Windrow, and Tracy Hatcher
Orientation: Panromantic pansexual, no preference (does not identify with any label)
Siblings: Christina Kristeva (older sister)
Profession: Police detective (Missing Persons), Minot (ND) Police Department
Distinguishing Characteristics: Mandala necklace; mandala tattoo on right shoulderblade; fox head tattoo on left lower arm; eye color changes from dark to medium to light gray, and handedness changes from right to left, based on personality; claustrophobic--e. g., avoids elevators; exaggerated startle/angry response to being touched unexpectedly
General Appearance: Generally dresses casual; often comes across as flippant and sarcastic; emotionally volatile--has anger issues but is generally compassionate/empathic and intuitive
First Appeared In: Four P
Character Summary: Max Kristeva's childhood in a rather well-to-do family was relatively normal until around age five, when he started being ritually abused by his father and other members of a small offshoot of a Satanic cult. He learned to block out memories of the experiences while his personality began to fragment. He was rescued from deliberate drowning by an undercover detective, Wesley Singer, who had been investigating the cult's activities on the Kristeva family property; not long after, at age eleven, he was forced to witness Singer's murder, while one of the cultists warned him, "If you say anything about this, then that--" pointing over the bridge where Singer's body had been thrown into the river "--is you." Young Max's mind took the warning literally--his original self "went to sleep," while a new personality took his place, and as time went on, modeled himself after what he knew of Det. Singer's personality. Meanwhile Max made himself forget all memories of the trauma, and the cult abuse stopped at that time.
Despite the absence of ongoing abuse, Max's teenage years weren't free of family drama; he had frequent run-ins with Luke Jonas, a member of the cult who worked for his father as chief of security on the family property. The two despised each other, as Jonas had been one of Max's primary abusers (Max couldn't remember this, but still instinctively hated him) and was still attracted to him, yet Jonas seethed at Max's "troublemaking," as Max took every opportunity he could to get Jonas in minor forms of trouble with his father/Jonas's boss. Adding to these tensions was the fact that Max was oddly popular with many of the younger members of Kappa Security, as he tended to treat them as equals (as opposed to Jonas's poor treatment of them) and at least once even took responsibility when one accidentally destroyed one of Mrs. Kristeva's vases. On one occasion Jonas managed to drug Max and attempted to assault him; however, the assistant chief of security, Den Heikkinen, noticed that the security cameras in that part of the household had been disabled, and turned them back on in time to witness the assault in progress; he set off the fire alarm and helped the barely conscious Max back to his room while Jonas was preoccupied dealing with the alarm. On another occasion, when Max was around sixteen, Jonas again drugged his drink and set it up to look like he'd attempted suicide by overdosing on pills and alcohol after cutting his arm. Max was taken to a private psychiatric hospital where the head psychiatrist, believing him to be combative and actively suicidal, ordered him to be kept sedated with various medications and even subjected him to electroconvulsive therapy. A nurse and a junior psychiatrist objected to this treatment but were overruled; Max's luck changed slightly, however, when the head psychiatrist went on vacation, at which time the junior psychiatrist appealed to a senior psychiatrist and their boss, the nurse backing up his claim that the teenager was overly medicated. The dosage of Max's medications was lowered to the point where he regained lucidity, but still wasn't allowed to leave the hospital, as he was considered to be in "denial" about being suicidal. Heikkinen managed to gain access to visit him briefly and convinced him to lie and take responsibility for trying to kill himself, otherwise he'd never be released; Max reluctantly did so and was finally allowed to go home. He avoided most direct interactions with Jonas following that, though Jonas mostly avoided him as well, obviously noticing the new intensity of hate simmering in Max's eyes.
Kristeva was expected to carry on the family tradition and become a doctor (he'd actually spent a good deal of his isolated childhood and teen years reading the medical and psychological texts in his family's library), but rebelled against the idea, and at age eighteen, after a falling-out with his father, he left home to attend college and enter the police academy, unconsciously fulfilling his new personality's desire to "become" Det. Singer. His sister, Chrissie, helped pay his initial way, as the only member of his family who seemed to take him seriously, though he promised to pay her back someday.
Luke Jonas attempted to bring Kristeva back into the fold through kidnapping, drugging him, and triggering a latent, cult-created personality, but the effort ultimately failed when a protector personality got Kristeva back to safety. To remind him of this incident, and of Singer's sacrifice, in the future, this personality had Kristeva get two tattoos--a fox head (after Singer's nickname, "Fox"), and a mandala (the necklace Singer always wore, and which he'd explained meant "whole, everything working together, all in one piece"). Kristeva also started wearing a mandala necklace himself, though consciously he wasn't sure of the reason behind any of this, and all he had left of the kidnapping experience was a two-week blank period.
Kristeva first worked as a deputy, then a detective, at the Ward County Sheriff's Department, during which time he was first briefly involved with his partner/coworker Deputy Tracy Hatcher, then married Natalie Greene; the marriage lasted only three months, due to Kristeva's increasingly (and inexplicably) abusive behavior. Kristeva was the one to request a divorce as he didn't like the direction he was headed in. He was transferred to the Minot Police Department, and set to work in the new Missing Persons Unit, with which he had little experience but a knack for solving cases due to his abilities as a "super recognizer" who rarely forgot faces. However, he snapped during a drug raid and shoved a suspect's head in a toilet after the man unexpectedly touched him; this incident forced him into anger-management therapy with a psychologist. Additionally, his habit of informally looking into unsolved cases of local animal mutilations and related crimes (which he had initially become interested in at the request of an Animal Control officer in the Sheriff's Department) earned him the label of "the guy who investigates dead animals," and his reputation on the police force suffered. He was partnered with newcomer Det. Chance Devetko, who disliked Kristeva's unusual investigative techniques (for example, numerous games of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" to determine who'd play what role in bizarre variations of "Good Cop, Bad Cop") so much that he requested a transfer. Police Chief Don Bowen informed him there were no other positions available and he was stuck with Kristeva for the time being. Gradually, Devetko realized that behind Kristeva's flippant persona was a genuine dedication to his work, and Kristeva in turn learned that Devetko's icy outward appearance wasn't as inflexible and unwelcoming as it seemed, and the two grew to grudgingly respect, and then admire, each other.
Kristeva was contacted by Cheryl Singer, who asked him to look into a cold case involving the disappearance of her uncle, Wesley Singer, who was believed to have run off on his family and his job with a contact he had in the criminal group he'd been investigating. Cheryl insisted this couldn't be so, that Det. Singer was too devoted to his work and to her to just disappear. She explained that he'd shown her a photograph of a boy he was trying to help; on seeing the photograph, Kristeva recognized himself, but didn't share this information with Cheryl. Despite Chief Bowen's warning not to, he and Devetko reopened Singer's missing person case, which had apparently been declared "closed" by the police department years earlier. They learned that not only had Singer been investigating apparent widespread cult activity in the Minot area, but that his case was connected to a later investigation, by Sgt. Mark Kincaid, which had led to the rescue of a drugged and injured teenager then known only as "Alan"; Sgt. Kincaid would later shoot and kill himself following contact with a woman possibly related to the cult, while Alan, whom he'd taken in, would become a lieutenant (and Kristeva's superior) in the Minot Police Department. In the Nineties, attention was again drawn to Lt. Kincaid's past when another Minot police officer, Chad Jenner, attempted to kill him and another person and was connected to a murder committed by young cultist Mitchell Barnes; Jenner was revealed to be a hitman for the cult, had ordered the murder at someone else's command, and hinted that Kincaid was himself a target. Many of the "cult"-related details of each case had been withheld from the public, and Kristeva and Devetko grew suspicious that someone in a position of authority could be behind the coverup.
In therapy, Kristeva began to wonder about his occasional memory lapses, as well as some recurring dreams, in particular one in which a glimmering circle appeared in the sky as everything grew dark and he could barely breathe, and another in which he saw his bedroom door cracking open at night. Under hypnosis, he started recovering fragments of memories from his childhood; overwhelmed, he went home and attempted to shoot himself, but was interrupted at the last minute by the telephone--it was his ex-wife Natalie, who'd been urged to contact him by Devetko, who'd noticed his partner's distracted state. The two rekindled their marriage, and Kristeva confided in his sister about what had happened in therapy; she confirmed his memory of his bedroom door cracking open, saying she'd seen him being led down the hall and away from the house one night. This, plus further developments in the Singer case--including the discovery of a skeleton with a mandala necklace similar to his, not far from a local bridge--bolstered Kristeva's belief that not only were all these bizarre incidents related, but that he was involved somehow, as well.
When Kristeva's car accidentally went off the bridge in question and he nearly drowned, he came to with no memory of the incident, though he found Devetko's card on him. Devetko explained that he'd spoken to Kristeva shortly after the event, but Kristeva had apparently not recognized his own partner, so Devetko had spoken to him like he was a stranger. The memory lapses increased, and when Kristeva began finding notes and reminders left to himself in his house, his psychologist sent him to a specialist for further assessment. After some time in treatment (including several unusual incidents which Kristeva couldn't recall, such as apparently cancelling his own treatment and then starting it up again), the psychiatrist asked to introduce him to someone, and to his shock a voice in his head answered. He learned that not only did he possess at least a few alternate personalities which occasionally took control without his knowledge, but that this had already been revealed in therapy, after which a hostile alter made him forget, and discontinued treatment; a helpful alter had reversed this decision. Since most of them answered to the name Max Kristeva ("It keeps things simple," one explained), the psychiatrist had numbered them in the order in which he'd met or heard of them:
*Number One was the "host" personality, who had no knowledge of the others (the personality which had been created in childhood, to emulate Det. Singer);
*Number Two was a relatively new "helper" personality who had come into existence following the car accident on the bridge, and who had first revealed the situation to the psychiatrist; he was also the primary leaver of the notes in the household, and the one who had restarted therapy;
*Number Three was a seemingly hostile personality (the one who was responsible for Kristeva's angry outbursts, had cancelled treatment, and frequently derided the psychiatrist and Number Two as unnecessary), but in truth was the same "protector" who had made Kristeva forget traumatic incidents, taken control of his life during breakdowns, protected the core personality, and had him get the fox and mandala tattoos to remind himself of Singer and his cult experiences when he was ready; he also admitted that, if Natalie hadn't called on the phone when she had, he would have prevented Kristeva from committing suicide;
*Number Four was a mute adolescent personality created to help deal with sexual trauma, who by now rarely came out;
*Number Five was the original "core" personality, who had gone to sleep in childhood, after which Number One took his place; he had resurfaced briefly following the car accident on the bridge, and was the one who had met with Devetko before going back inside, thus explaining why he didn't recognize the other detective.
The psychiatrist managed to convince Numbers One, Two, and Three to start working together and develop limited co-consciousness (such as communicating mentally, as had happened in therapy) to help minimize memory lapses and psychosomatic illnesses (Kristeva had a tendency to suffer from migraines and nosebleeds when the different personalities were in conflict). Number Three created an internal world/"headspace" modeled after a police station hallway, lined with numbered doors to house the known personalities; in this interior world, Number One appeared as himself/a Minot detective, Number Two appeared as a uniformed Minot officer (a position Kristeva never actually held), and Number Three appeared as a Ward County sheriff's deputy, while Four and Five remained mostly unseen in their rooms. Number Three pointed out how there were other doors in the hallway, hinting at the possibility of yet-unknown alters; over time, several more of these became known:
*Number Six, the cult-created personality whom Luke Jonas had attempted to elicit; he's potentially hostile and compliant with the cult, but so far has been kept mostly contained by the others;
*Number Seven, an "introject"/interior personality physically based on Det. Singer;
*Number Eight, an introject personality based on Sgt. Kincaid;
*Number Nine, an introject personality based on Juliana "July" Lockett, the murder victim in the Mitchell Barnes case;
*Number Ten, an introject personality based on Thunderhead, a horse Kristeva owned as a child, which was killed by the cult and the death blamed on coyotes.
Numbers One through Six responded to the name Max Kristeva and took his physical appearance (albeit at different stages of life--One, Two, and Six being adults, Three being teenager to adult, Four an adolescent, and Five a child), while the "introject" personalities, Seven through Ten, took the name and appearance of the people they were based on, and only appeared in the interior world or as hallucinations in the outside world (for example, standing behind Kristeva in mirrors), and almost never took executive control of the body. Kristeva's switches are typically signalled by his eyes fluttering and rolling upward and, depending on the amount of conflict between the two alters, headaches and nosebleeds. His eyes may also change shade (for example, Number Three has dark gray eyes, whereas Number Two's are light, and Number One's are medium).
Kristeva became acquainted with Det. Michelle "Mike" Rosedale when she contacted him for help on one of her own cases which shared similarities with Minot cases, and also asked that he try to help her locate her long-missing brother, Jason, who had been kidnapped as a child and was believed by her parents to be dead. Jason was in fact still alive, going under the name Jay Campion--he himself had developed alternate personalities due to childhood trauma (of which "Jay Campion" was one, taking over control from Jason Rosedale), and had incidentally been recruited as a hitman by the same cult responsible for Kristeva's abuse--a position Kristeva himself had been intended to take, before he broke free and became a police officer. Campion figured out how to trigger Number Six by means of a specific dial tone, but, learning of his and Kristeva's similarities, developed an odd, friendly rivalry with him, seeing him as a "kindred spirit." Kristeva, in turn, developed a sense of empathy for Campion when he confiscated his personal laptop and discovered a series of videos filmed (and hidden from Campion) by Jason Rosedale, where he explained his situation, and made it clear that he does still exist, even if he rarely has the ability to take control anymore. Det. Rosedale was one of the few to learn of Kristeva's condition (Devetko had been the first to figure it out on his own), when he "outed" himself as multiple to her, in an attempt to explain how her sweet-natured brother could also be a murderous sociopath.
Currently, Kristeva, Devetko, allies they've made on the job--and, ironically, Campion, in his own way--are still investigating the Singer/Kincaid case, after learning that Luke Jonas and possibly even someone closer to home could be involved, in an effort to bring closure both to Cheryl Singer, the only one to hold out hope over the years, and to Kristeva himself, who came to remember how Singer had saved him in his childhood (the glimmering circle in his dream was his memory of Singer's mandala necklace, shining down at him as Singer pulled him from the water) and had ultimately given his life for him.
[Please report typos!]
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