Franz

Franz is an experienced stalker who guides the protagonist of the novel Achromatopsia, along with the rest of the expedition team, on their mission to find the source of the radio signal.

Overview
He is a Polish veteran stalker who has not only left the confines of the Varsovian Metro plenty of times, but has travelled over a dozen kilometres outside of Warsaw too. This - considering the lethal radiation, freezing cold of the nuclear winter, and aggressive stance of the surface mutants towards all humans - is no small feat. Franz seems to know his way around Poland's capital and its outskirts better than anyone else in the book.

In the novel, he is described as being around 40 years old, with greying black hair and a stubble on his face, appearing sharp-witted and wearing a military coat with high-grade stalker gear. Franz claims to be able to memorise maps just by looking at them; if true, it is possible that he has a photographic memory which would be part of the explanation as to the origin of his astute pathfinding skills.

At one point, Franz says that he remembers the Unnamed Scholar (the protagonist and narrator of Achromatopsia) from school, suggesting that they shared a class before the war and studied at the same school.

Trivia

 * Wording in the book suggests that the rifle Franz uses is not an AKS-74u, but a normal Kalash that has had its barrel manually shortened (similarly to a sawed-off shotgun).
 * Franz is possibly named after Franz Maurer, the main character of an immensely popular 1992 movie "Psy" ("Dogs", in this context a derogatory Polish slang term for the police - comparable to the English "pigs").

Gallery
Franz