Legal Name: Wendell Allen Roussimoff
Aliases: Wendy Ru, The CEO of MANNA, Anklebiter
Sex: Male
Species: Canis Rathi (albino poodle)
Age: Mid-fifties
Place of Birth: Perpignan, France, Earth-660
Occupation: Grifter, crime lord, smuggler, NPR & BBC business correspondent, Founder & CEO of MANNA
Height: 4'7”
Weight: 95lbs
Sexuality: Heterosexual
Marital Status: Divorced (for all the good it does him)
Known Relatives: Sorova Moniqual (ex-wife), Jean Roussimoff (mother), Marcus Roussimoff (father), Sylvan Roussimoff (brother), At least four other siblings
Vehicle of Choice: Whatever his chauffeur rents that week
Weapons of Choice: .22 revolvers, poison, blackmail, bribe money
Creator(s): Pyrodox (design), Groveclearer (characterization)
Voiceclaim: Alex Hassell
Born into a large family of small men who could distantly trace their lineage back to nobility, Wendell had a fairly uneventful childhood. Despite having a fully intact family unit and no real issues, he clearly found his upbringing to be inadequate as he frequently partook in both drugs and their distribution from his teenage years onward, getting involved in doing the numbers for outlaw gambling dens by his early twenties. Despite eventually earning a degree in finance, this would be his true education in the world of business management.
Being covered in track marks and having underworld connections is something you can only hide from your family for so long, and thus Wendell was sent abroad on a backpacking tour to sober himself up.
It was just outside Amsterdam in 1994 that he discovered an alien cask containing a miracle substance; iridescent in color and lightweight, soft as cotton, tough as titanium, impervious to extremes of heat and cold, self-replicating when charged with an isolated electric current. He named the substance “manna” (or MANNA, as the trademark is in all caps) and quickly began reorganizing his connections to form a legitimate business around discovering and marketing the manifold industrial uses of the stuff.
Among the groups interested in selling MANNA were eccentric Norwegian billionaire Lord Shane Hagan, an insanely rich self-professed Satanist with a penchant for investing in biomedical tech, and Prometheus Labs, a UN sponsored “futurist” tech firm founded out of Egypt. Wendell deftly managed to play both parties against one another, setting off a bidding war that was the talk of the business world, before announcing in 1997 the formation of a publicly traded company with an insane stock price buy-in thanks to the inflated valuation. Lord Hagan begrudgingly invested 35% ownership into the company with the hopes Wendell's shortsightedness would cause him to be edged out of the company within the first year. Seemingly changing his mind entirely out of the blue, Hagan quietly cashed all his stock seven months later when it sextupled in value. Prometheus Labs backed out of the venture entirely after becoming displeased with Wendell's business practices.
To commemorate this, Wendell decided to commission a full three-piece suit for himself made out of MANNA. He found a small, nondescript tailor shop in Japan ran by an oafish foreigner and successfully conscripted him under an NDA. Two months later, Wendell had his suit. He began wearing it almost constantly.
Wendell was riding high for a few years. The extraterrestrial origin of MANNA and its reproductive capabilities were a closely guarded trade secret. Despite pressure from lobbyists and the UN, Wendell was living the Silicon Valley dream of having a total monopoly over the most precious substance on Earth. Multiple attempts were made on his life during this period, but he always seemed to avoid them by the skin of his teeth by sheer luck. Noticing that his usual drug-induced pastimes were not granting him much of a reprieve anymore, Wendell began seeking escape in extravagance. One such trip to the opera stirred something in him and he became infatuated with one of the performers – Sorova Moniqual. That she was seventeen and he was nearly twice her age did not deter him in the least. Nor did it seem to be much of a barrier for her. They married less than a year later. In doing so Wendell was taken to an alien planet and inducted into the Church of Revenance. The whole incident was so otherworldly (literally) that Wendell assumed for many years that he'd simply dreamt it.
Despite his profits' continuing to soar quarter over quarter, year over year, concerns over MANNA's long-term health benefits began to arise. This was, after all, in the wake of the banning of asbestos and MANNA was quickly becoming a substitute for it. Thanks to an anonymous tip, Prometheus Labs began investigating the substance and found a direct correlation between MANNA exposure and decreased synaptic function. Against Wendell's protestations a formal investigation was launched into the substance and it was found that MANNA was in fact a parasitoid silicon fungus of extraterrestrial origin. A long, long legal proceeding then began which saw MANNA shuttered and Wendell's assets frozen.
Though never the sanest man to begin with, it was during this multi-year investigation that Wendell's mental health hit rock bottom. Attempting to overdose almost daily and indulging his unfaithful side, Sorova's attempts to keep him sane were met with outright hostility that resulted in both verbal and physical abuse. He eventually divorced her legally, but as far as the Church is concerned they are still married. Sorova took advantage of the separation to become one of the Church's most skilled enforcers, but she occasionally returns to rekindle their relationship, much to Wendell's chagrin.
Failing his insanity plea against the overwhelming evidence of rational thinking and strategy required to build and maintain the company, Wendell's lawyers were able to sway the mainstream public into believing his actions were largely a result of him being patient zero for MANNA infection. Thus, the death sentence was thrown out and in 2002 he was instead slapped with fifteen years imprisonment with possibility for parole under the provision he was unable to operate a business in any country belonging to the UN. This was seen as an outrage by the then tens of thousands of families with members suffering from irreparable brain damage and several civil suits, and “Victims of” funds have been created in the time since.
On the eve of his sentencing, Wendell received an anonymous tip of his own that the person to leak the details about MANNA's nature to Prometheus Labs was none other than the Tailor.
Wendell's imprisonment didn't last terribly long. Although bound to a small yet very posh French estate for his sentence, nobody on Earth would've ever believed that the Church of Revenance was real or advanced space travel was possible. Certainly not Wendell, who had the joy of rediscovering that his (now ex) wife was in fact an alien with access to FTL spaceships and multiple other bits of technology that far exceeded what was available on Earth in the early 21st century. It didn't take long to rewire his surveillance system to permit frequent off-planet jaunts into CoR territory. During his sojourns to the stars, he learned of the existence of Zucca Xerfantes and Doc Mallory's connection to him. Further infuriated at the tailor, Wendell plotted vengeance upon him.
In 2012 he managed to shunt both Mallory and Xerfantes into a pocket dimension of compressed time. The twenty minutes it took them to escape equated to four years on Earth. By the time they returned Wendell was out on the streets again, and early at that. Nowadays Wendell utilizes his infamy to become an ironic celebrity panelist on many finance shows and podcasts. He was also on the French version of The Masked Singer for a couple episodes and has an Absolute Mad Lads dedicated to him. All this while also secretly being a part of a cosmic scene largely unknown to the people of Earth-660.
Although a protected member of the CoR (if only by marriage), Wendell is not well-liked among their ranks due to his frequent attempts to jump-start an interstellar criminal empire within their bounds. Though many would be content with simply leaving him on Earth to suffer the consequences of his crimes, the more patient members of the CoR believe he is capable of being reformed into a productive member of society. That their archenemy, Cantor Grammick, has taken credit for inventing MANNA has only bolstered their resolve to do so. Wendell himself vacillates wildly between impatience, anger, smoldering depression, the desire to kill Doc Mallory, contentedness, and borderline catatonia on a near daily basis. For all his evil he is ultimately the victim of a much greater evil.
STRENGTHS
- Lucky: No matter what, it seems that Wendell almost always comes out unscathed. More or less. He should be dead a dozen times over but keeps baffling friend and foe alike by surviving.
- Persistent: Perhaps the one truly positive trait he possesses, Wendell makes sure to get whatever he wants. If he's got a goal in mind, he will achieve it no matter how many attempts it takes. It'd be downright inspirational if he wasn't such a shallow, selfish bastard.
- Political: Wendell has an extensive network of connections both legitimate and criminal across Europe, Japan, and the Indies that he's established over the course of his career. And that's just on Earth. Since setting up shop in the Alpha Sector he's managed to worm his way into deals with multiple planets across several solar systems. Despite his negative reputation he's capable of setting himself up with most anything he wants or needs. The trick is careful use of leverage and checks that don't bounce.
WEAKNESSES
- Addict: You name it, Wendy's done it. Poppers, booze, dope, scratch, red sand... there's a better than 50% chance he's on at least one drug at any given time. His small body and fast metabolism may actually work to his benefit in this regard, as foreign substances pass through him like water. He's all but immune to painkillers by this stage in his life, for better and worse. This comes with all the usual downsides of being a drug addict – high risk behaviors, paranoia, delusions of grandeur, physical weakness (well, exacerbated physical weakness), unclear thinking, selfishness, and overall treating people like crap.
- MANNA infectee: The substance he discovered and marketed as MANNA was in fact an experimental silicon based fungus designed by Cantor Grammick that feeds off of brainwaves. And he wore a full three-piece suit of it for two years straight. His neurological functions have been permanently damaged in ways that only a handful of people in the galaxy can understand (Grammick, Kristie Sparks) or empathize with (Zucca, Doc). That he still remains willfully ignorant of this fact is a testament either to how emotionally screwed up he was before exposure or how insidious the fungus in question is. Sorova insists he was a nice man when they first met.
- Solipsistic: Whether by design or by choice, Wendy overlooks all the harm he causes other people with his behavior. All that matters is what he wants right here, right now. His impatience and hedonism make him woefully ignorant of the larger universe around him. He thought the Church of Revenance was a Haitian voodoo cult for many, many years before it finally dawned on him that they were an extra-planetary entity. For whatever reason, Sorova finds his obvious mental health issues to be “cute”. She thinks she can “fix him”. Whether she can or not remains to be seen.
- Tiny: Wendy is not a big man by any stretch. He doesn't have dwarfism but he does have manlet genes. Comes with being a poodle.
- Unfulfilled: Wendell is very much of the mind that success is having lots of big cars (that other people drive for you), big houses, nice clothes, and beautiful women half your age. He has wasted his whole life in the hollow pursuit of these things and often loses interest in them after he has obtained them. To him, life is just one hit chase after another.
- Zero combat skills: Wendy seemingly has zero survival skills that do not involve talking his way out of situations, stealing things, paying people off, hiding in barrels, or tripping over potholes, and avoiding sniper shots. He carries firearms (legal and otherwise) but has no proficiency with them. Despite Sorova's attempts to drill some basics into his head, he's still just as likely to blow one of his ears off as he is to hit a target ten feet away. This extends to his laughable hand-to-hand skills which can be described as a combination of biting at legs and comically wide cartoon windmill punches. The legendary “wimp fight” between himself and the even smaller and frailer Elder Saleria witnessed by Pyrodox is the subject of much conjecture as it's never been retold the same way twice and its very occurrence is a matter of philosophical debate between the CoR's lay brothers.
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Bio by Groveclearer
Image 1 by Pyrodox
Image 2 by Pyrodox
