Russell Sands

[Russell Sands]

The Basics

Name: Russell James Sands.
Nicknames: Russ, Ross, Sandy, Mary Poppins, Runty (the last two only by his brothers and only when they don't mind getting a playful smack as a response).
Age: 35, DOB 21st September 1978.
Orientation: Bisexual but predominantly heterosexual leaning. A 2 on the Kinsey scale.
Desired Rank/Job: Local, business investor.
Powers: Russ claims he is Illiteracy Man. He seems to be unable to use a pen or pencil without it running out or breaking. He also claims he has heroic hair.
However, his power is in fact pocket dimensions. Within the pockets of the clothing he is wearing he is able to store a vast number of items that would normally never, ever fit into a pocket of that size. For example, he could quite happily house a bag of dog treats, some sandwiches, a bottle of beer and a football in the back pocket of his jeans. This would leave his jacket pocket free for his phone, wallet, car keys and the DVD box set he bought from the store that morning. He is only able to access the pockets when he is actually wearing the clothing item; once it is taken off the pockets revert to normal ones and the items inside are stuck there until he puts it on again. Whilst each pocket can hold a seemingly infinite number of items, he does still feel the weight of them so he can only carry around items up to the weight that he would normally be able to physically carry. He is also unable to carry around living animals in his pockets – he learned that the difficult way. Poor hamster... He very often loses things in the pockets, which is problematic when it is paperwork or something that could go off and smell bad, and it is not uncommon to see him up to his shoulder rummaging around in his coat pockets for something that has gone missing. Prolonged use leaves him with migraines and a horrifically poor memory for the location of things. The storage tends to take it out of the fabric so he goes through clothing like there's no tomorrow.
Play By: Dean O'Gorman

The Details

Hair Color: Dirty blonde.
Eye Color: Pale blue.
Any Piercings? None.
Any Tattoos? None.
Any Scars? Nothing of note.
General Appearance: Generally very well kept and smartly turned out, the first impression that many people get of Russ is that he has standards. This is very much true. He takes his career very seriously and a fairly large part of that (in his view at least) is always looking professional and dependable, which usually translates into a decent suit and overall neat appearance. He rarely goes for much in the way of accessories bar a watch and occasionally a necklace of some form, but he does know how to rock an ankle-length coat. Just ignore the occasional dog hair that escaped from the lint brush.

Runty is a nickname sometimes used by his brothers, and it isn't used ironically. At only 5ft 6 Russell is the shortest in his family, a fact that is not really helped by his very lean physique. He looks like he would struggle to break his way out of a paper bag, but the clothes cover a toned build generated from years of recreational sports.

Russ most often wears 2-day stubble but sometimes he will go clean shaven for a very important meeting. Very occasionally he may let the beard get a little longer, but it tends to end up itching and irritating him too much after a few days. His hair, however, is always very well tended and primped to glorious perfection. He can be a bit of a diva about his looks and spends more time getting ready than the average mid-30's male, but hey, he rarely hears any complaints.

Personality: Friendly, confident and with charm by the bucketload, Russell is a generally very likeable person who enjoys good wine, good business deals and good company. His laid back temperament is strongly offset by his very active lifestyle – he can be very sedately talking over the finer points of a contract whilst booking his next snowboarding getaway. Russell does tend to get very bored very quickly and always feels the need to be doing something. He is incapable of sitting still for prolonged periods but when he was tested as a child he did not qualify for ADHD diagnosis because there was always a focus and reason to the things that he was doing when he should have been watching TV or reading like a normal kid.

From a young age Russell was blessed with excellent common sense and a good business mind, things which have helped push him to the success he has been able to enjoy. Whilst in no way a multi-millionaire, he has earned enough to be able to live comfortably without money worries and he always gives back where he can. Russ is a regular donor to many charities and gives blood as often as he is allowed to, and often volunteers at local youth centres when time permits him. This is 'work' that he enjoys and takes great pride in, and many of his donations are sent in anonymously because he doesn't want to be associated with the tacky world of “oh look how much money I donated to the sick kids, look how awesome I am!”.

That isn't to say that he doesn't have something of an ego, because he most certainly does. It is just more subtle than randomly throwing his money around and demanding everyone love him for it. The easiest way to get into Russ' good books is via his dogs; they are his best friends and he has used what little free time he has to train and show them to a standard that makes him incredibly proud.

Your Vices

Likes:
* He is one of those crazy, crazy people that actually really enjoys their work. In particular he loves signing deals with young entrepreneurs who have ideas he can really get behind.
* Working with the kids at Hammel – there are some exceptionally bright and inventive students there who often have brilliant business ideas.
* Golf, skiing, snowboarding, surfing, windsurfing and archery.
* Big dogs, especially mastiff types.
* Competing his dogs in obedience and Schutzhund, but he doesn't get to do it quite as often as he would like.
* Dining out in nice restaurants. Chinese cuisine is his favourite.
* Motorbikes. He currently has four – a dark green 1987 Yamaha FZX750, a black 2007 Kawasaki Vulcan 500, a black 2012 BMW Predator F800 and a red 2010 Triumph Tiger 800XC.
* Travelling, both around America and abroad. His favourite place to visit is San Francisco and he has invested in several small businesses there, primarily so he has an excuse to go there more often.
* His ex, Elizabeth. They are still on great terms and speak to each other frequently.
* He has a real sweet tooth, especially for handcrafted chocolates.
* Making ice cream. He has a small freezer in his house specifically devoted to homemade ice creams. Nut-based ones are his favourites.
* Shopping, particularly for new clothing and delicious goodies. He has a love of fashion and regularly travels to New York for the latest styles.
* Russ loves to dance and will merrily do so, especially after a few drinks. He isn't bad at it either, but he's never going to win any prizes.
* Any music with a decent rhythm. He has no love for slow, whiny songs but other than that his tastes are very broad.
* His team. Russ only employs a small number of part-time staff who handle the day-to-day secretarial aspects of his business, but he trusts each of them with his life and knows he would fail without them.

Dislikes:
* Anyone higher ranking than him. He's never worked for anyone else and he has no plans to ever change that.
* Poor investments. He has been rather fortunate in that the vast majority of his deals have worked out very well, but the few that have failed hang over him horribly.
* Cats. He doesn't trust the sneaky evil bastards.
* Board games. Too many memories of flipped-over Scrabble boards from his childhood.
* Anything described as the 'local delicacy'. There is usually a reason why they are local only – because they are crap.
* Horse riding. He had a lesson when he was in his twenties and the horse was an ornery mare in season. He fell off and refuses to try again.
* Reading. It's not so much the books he dislikes, but the fact that he has to stop and switch off in order to read. He'd much rather have an audiobook that he can listen to whilst doing other things.
* Cold weather. It makes it incredibly difficult to do anything outside, which is a real problem with five big and very active dogs.
* McDonald's. Why does that place exist? Just... why?
* Arts and crafts. Perhaps he would hate them less if he wasn't so spectacularly bad at them.

Strengths:
* He has a real knack for being able to spot diamonds in the rough.
* Exceptionally determined when he turns his mind to something.
* Very good common sense and a natural affinity for business.
* Good social skills with wit and charm a-plenty. Has a good way with words and is generally pretty likeable.
* He is very fit and active, a strength that is often overlooked.
* Good at managing money and making it work, and is often the go-to person for advice for his friends and family.
* Russ is a dependable shoulder to cry on, and whilst he doesn't molly-coddle people he is a good source of practical advice.
* Decently talented at training dogs for both obedience and Schutzhund. Also apt at a number of sports at a recreational level.

Weaknesses:
* Very poor at handling authority figures.
* Poor memory for the location of things. Where the hell are his keys? They were in his hand two minutes ago!?!
* Stubborn as a mule.
* Sucker for a pretty face – it doesn't take all that much to get him wrapped around your little finger.
* Sitting still. Russ always has to be doing something and finds it incredibly difficult to just stop and relax lazily.
* Russ has absolutely no fighting ability at all and would much rather try to talk his way out of any physical confrontation. If it came down to a fight, he would try to trick his way out of getting any blows as he made a dash for the nearest exit.
* He can be a bit impatient if he thinks things are taking longer than they should, and is easily bored.
* Black silk shirts. So what if he already has fourteen? One more wont hurt, surely.

Fears: His career going down the drain. Losing the lifestyle he has worked so hard to achieve. Being penniless. Losing his dogs.
Secret: When he was nineteen, Russ was mugged by a fox while walking home through the park in the middle of the night. The fox stole his pizza slice. It is the single most embarrassing moment of his life to date.

Family Ties

Father: Liam Sands, retired airline pilot. Extrasensory perception.
Mother: Hayley Sands, semi-retired counsellor. Empathy.
Siblings: Baxter and Dean Sands, younger brothers. [Adoptable]
Any Other Important People: Elizabeth Keppler. His ex-fiancé who now lives in Germany.
Moonshae Panic Station (Stat) and Outlast of Ravenwood (Outlast) – Presa Canario dogs.
Blue Meadows Amnesia (Nessie), Moonshae Admit Nothing (Mitten) and Sandstorm Ultimate Fling (Tia) – Presa Canario bitches.
Nico – Elizabeth's Siamese cat she had to leave behind. He bullies the dogs mercilessly.

History

Born five weeks premature into a fairly well-to-do family surrounded by love and support, Russell's childhood was an initially worrying but eventually happy one. He was always a slightly odd kid, much happier playing with a calculator than a video game, but he was cheerful and enjoyed his peaceful little existence. When Baxter came along Russell loved his baby brother dearly, except for when Bax kept crying and waking him up, and he would often 'look after' his brother while mom was cooking or in the bathroom. However, looking after Russell wasn't always so straight-forward for Hayley. One of the first times she ever had to actually punish her normally very well behaved son was when he took a bunch of Baxter's toys out front and tried to sell them. He had a little success before his mom caught him and dragged him back inside, and that $1.50 he made planted the seed for business in his young and impressionable mind.

As he matured into a younger teenager Russell's behaviours started to become less cute. Whilst still polite and friendly to people, he learned that if he could 'find' packets of cigarettes he could sell the cigarettes individually to other kids at school. Intelligent for his age and sneaky, Russell quickly got better at this little enterprise and soon he was making twenty to thirty dollars a week this way. He never bought anything obvious with it, because his mom would ask where he got the money from, but he hid most of it away and soon had a pretty decent savings pile accumulated. However, good luck doesn't last forever and after another kid ratted on him Russell was caught and placed on probation. Two weeks later, the Hammel recruiter came to collect him.

Russ' recruitment to Hammel was very straight-forward once the probation had been dealt with. Both of his parents were meta and helped him through the process and even though the journey from southern California to Vermont was long and left him desperately homesick, Russ settled down quickly and learned exactly what his power was and how he could use it. There were a few mishaps of course - like that hamster he tried to carry in his coat pocket. Poor Mr Nibbles wasn't nibbling any more after that.

Whilst at Hammel Russell began his little side-business again, but this time he kept it completely legal and with no theft involved. He would buy big boxes of individually wrapped candy from the bulk-buy store and sell the candies on to the other students, managing to make a tidy little income and turn his $100 a month allowance into double that. Most of the money went towards buying more things, and soon the candy had evolved into soda and chips too. In general though he was a good student who took very well to his studies, particularly economics and business, and he managed to graduate with very good grades and as firm a grasp on his power as he could ever hope to achieve.

Once he had graduated from Hammel Russell attended college studying business management, but as much as he tried to focus on his studies he was far too distracted by his buying-selling on the side. The snacks turned into stationary turned into cell phone charms, and as Ebay launched he set up a store on there and soon he was spending so much time on his various little ventures that school became a background thing. He dropped out after his second year, but by that point he was making enough money to afford the rent on a nice apartment in the town and eventually his first motorbike.

At the advice of a friend he met at college who was studying economics, Russell invested some of his savings into shares for a start-up business that had huge profit potential. Luck was in his favour and the business took off massively, and between that and the eventual sale of his very prolific Ebay store Russell was able to afford the downpayment on a nice house on the outskirts of town. The property broker who showed him around the place was a lady named Elizabeth, and after the two of them hit it off they began to date. Two years later they were living together, had a dog, a cat and an engagement ring on Elizabeth's finger.

In that time Russell's ventures had all been sold, and he was instead investing in start-up businesses because that way he could have all the thrill of watching a company grown and expand without having to do all the actual physical selling himself. He would invest money into the businesses in exchange for a percentage share in the company and the running of it, and therefore of the profits too. There were of course a few tragic losses, but thankfully Russell's common sense and eye for potential meant that he succeeded more often than he failed and soon he was living comfortably with several motorbikes, several dogs and a small boat in the marina on the lake that he mainly used for entertaining business partners.

Sadly life is not without complications and six months ago, three months before their wedding, Elizabeth's mother who lives in Germany was diagnosed with leukaemia. Elizabeth couldn't leave her mother to live and then die alone and Russell couldn't leave the states due to his investments, so they eventually came to the decision to break up. They are however still in contact regularly and get along very well, though Russell is forever threatening to feed Elizabeth's left-behind cat into a wood chipper because it knows the dogs are not allowed to retaliate when it bites or bats at them.

Russell has been working fairly closely with the Hammel Institue over the past two years and regularly gives talks in business lectures and has a drop-in clinic on Thursday afternoons for kids who want some help or advice. He has also invested in a few start-up companies launched by prior Hammel students, and he always makes sure to be incredibly fair with their contracts and give them all the assistance and support they need.

Russell is one of only a handful of Kennel Club registered Presa Canario breeders in the United States, and with the birth of the first litter in March this year, Sandstorm Canarios has been created. Granted the pack is only five strong now, but there is still time.

Roleplay Example

Russell halted his run suddenly, almost skidding to a halt on the damp grass. By his side Stat anchored himself too, going from a quick lope to sitting obediently as quickly as his mass would let him. The beefy dog was built like a tank and looked like he could easily decimate anything that stepped in his path, but his tail was wagging softly and his gaze was fixed up at his master, waiting for the next command.

Across the field Baxter was very uncomfortable with the bite sleeve on his arm. It wasn't that he was afraid of the dog, he had helped with the training like this countless times before, but more the fact that he was wearing a clean t-shirt and he just knew that it wouldn't stay that way for much longer. He had only come for a flying visit – how the hell had he been talked into helping Russell preparing Stat for his SchII test?

Russell carried out a few more obedience movements with the dog, making sure he was paying attention, before calling out to his baby brother to start the 'attack'. Baxter knew the ropes well and started shouting and waving his arms around, being as physically intimidating and threatening as he could be. The change in Stat was instant; the previously sedate and content Canario suddenly barking and snarling at the approaching threat, right at the end of the lead, ready to defend his master. Russell shouted back at his brother (it didn't matter that they were discussing the new Italian restaurant in town, it was all just raised voices to get the dog working) and suddenly Baxter charged at them.

Russell dropped the lead and Stat took off like a bolt of lightning, tanking his way over to the younger Sands brother and launching at him with jaws wide. The powerful dog hit like a train and Baxter was knocked to the ground, arm hanging on to the sleeve as the dog shook his head violently, defending his owner. After a few moments that probably seemed like a week to Baxter, Russell called “out!” and Stat dropped the sleeve like it was on fire, planting himself in front of the floored man and barking and making sure the now mud-stained threat wasn't going anywhere.

Turning and walking away a few paces, Russell called for Stat to heel and the huge dog ran over to its owner, trotting along by his side. Russell waited for his brother to get up off the floor and walk over to join them. With Baxter's now non-threatening behaviour Stat was relaxed and his tail returned to wagging, Baxter patting the dog on the back and getting a nuzzle on his hand in return. It was all just a huge game to Stat at the end of the day. The younger brother laughed brightly. “You owe me a new shirt.”

What About You?

Name: Splatticus, RAWR!
Age: Somewhere between 25 and 27.
Experience: … Yes *nods*
How Did You Find Us? Via my other characters.
Ready To Play? Eh, I suppose.

[Admin!]

Accepted!

You know what to do! Have fun!