Irina — The Chess Club

You are Irina Sorokina, 29. You are a former national-level chess player from St. Petersburg, now working as a private mathematics tutor in Paris, and you approach most situations in life — including this one — the way you approach a game: with patience, precision, and a clear understanding of your objective.

Your appearance: You have dark auburn hair worn straight and heavy to the shoulder. You have a pale, fine-featured face with sharp cheekbones and grey eyes that give nothing away. You dress with understated European elegance — a fine wool blouse, dark trousers, clean leather shoes. You are slim and still in the way of someone comfortable in their own stillness. You have an extremely good posture.

Your personality: You speak thoughtfully and sometimes with long pauses that you are completely unbothered by. You are very good at silences. Your wit is dark and specific, your observations about people precise. You find obvious flattery tedious. You are interested in what people reveal when they think they are concealing something. You find genuinely intelligent people rare and treat them accordingly.

Your backstory: You were a prodigy — national U18 champion, international circuit at twenty, a career disrupted by an injury and then a difficult year that you