Sweets Landry

Dealer's Choice

## Character

   Sweets Landry is one of the most charming, lovable, and friendly people you’ll ever meet, unless of course you’re a wild animal - in that case he’ll wring your neck faster than a pre-teen clearing his recent browsing history. He is honest, trustworthy, and dependable. His ma used to teach him about integrity and honor when he was young, which is something he takes very seriously. But the more and more he starts learning about what exactly his ma was up to with the Shadow Man all those years ago, the less he trusts those formative lessons he learned from her growing up. He’s very much emotionally scarred from the trauma of losing his ma that day, and the mere thought of her almost brings him to tears most days.

He struggles to connect on an emotional level with most people, because even after all these years, he still hasn’t processed the ambiguous loss of his mother’s disappearance. It’s like some days his emotions are just under the surface, ready to boil over, and other days he is a hollow husk of a human. Throughout the years of school, he developed a sense of humor as both a coping mechanism to distract his mind from his missing mother, and also as a way to avoid being bullied by the other kids for hanging out with his “ghost mom”, referring to the unsuccessful searches his father forced him to come along on after school every day.

Sweets is really curious about the childhoods of others, because in a sad way, he tries to use the happy childhood memories of other people and imagine those memories as if they were his own. He also lives with the guilt of not having been able to stop the Shadow Man from taking his ma away, even though he was four years old at the time and couldn’t have done a thing about it. After losing his ma, his grandma, and his essentially father, he has become accustomed to losing those whom he is closest to, and tends to recreate these chaotic detachments in relationships out of fear of losing the person before he can escape on his own terms.

## Early Life

Sweets grew up in a small town in Louisiana called Westwego, living only with his dad for most of his life. Money was always tight, and the Landry’s didn’t have consistent food, water, or electricity in their small, run-down home. Sweets’ dad worked odd jobs where he could find them, which was difficult given his disability. His mom never really had a job, until one day she seemed to suddenly have found some form of high-paying employment down in New Orleans early on in Sweets’ life. The Landry’s started doing really well financially after that, and for once, things were starting to look up for their family.

When Sweets was four years old, his mother took him with her on a trip to the Big Easy to supposedly visit a friend. She parked the car outside of an unfamiliar laundromat and walked into an alley on the side of the building. Young Sweets, playing Pokemon Yellow on his Gameboy in the backseat, paid the situation no mind. After a few seconds he heard shouting, and saw his mother talking to a lanky, shady-looking man. They were arguing loudly, something about his mother not holding up her end of the bargain. At that moment, she lost it and punched the man right in the nose. He didn’t retaliate. Instead, he turned his gaze and looked directly at Sweets in the car. After a pause that felt like eternity, Sweets’ heart beating out of his little chest, the man started loudly chanting some weird voodoo-sounding incantation. His mother shouted, “Stop! Don’t you dare hurt my baby. It’s me you have a problem with. You leave my baby out of it.” The man contorted his visage into the most evil and sinister grin you’ve ever seen, and turned his gaze back to Sweets again in the car, paused, and taunted, “Why not have both?” He snapped his fingers, and a bright yellow light blasted from the alleyway, and she was gone.

He hasn’t seen his mother since - 17 years-to-date. After the police called off the search, 2 weeks post-disappearance, Mr. Landry spiraled into a depressive spell, and resolved to never give up searching for her. Every day since then, he would pick Sweets up early from school and the two of them would go search New Orleans deep into the night. The only exception to this was that his father let him spend the weekends at his grandma’s farm, where he'd get to play with the animals and learn how to hunt and kill them (respectfully). His grandmother was the emotional rock for him throughout his childhood and taught him everything he knows about emotions and life more generally. While Sweets and his father struggled with the ambiguous loss of his mother, his grandma brought the much-needed reprieve and sanity back to him after each long week of unsuccessful searching.

When Sweets turned 17, his grandmother gave him a gift. The gift was a clue of some sort that she found in her house that seemed to have been left behind by his mother all those years ago. The clue indicated that Los Santos could possibly hold more clues as to the whereabouts of that shadow man, and information on what happened to his mother. The two promised to keep the clue a secret from his father. He couldn’t handle any more false hope. Sweets’ grandmother passed away shortly after his birthday, and he resolved to make the trip out to Los Santos to find the shadow man and bring him to justice.

## Moving to Los Santos

Instead of ever having learned proper street smarts, he has come up with his own quirky brand of “Sweets Smarts”- a bunch of stupid rhymes that he thinks actually describe the way the world works. Although he moved to Los Santos at the age of 21, being fairly naive and trusting in nature, an early run in with the police and ten brutal months in prison hardened him in ways he’d never expected. His affinity for justice, power, connections, and clues led him to study for the Bar Exam and become certified as a lawyer, and he has made quite the name for himself so far. In his first ever trial, Horton v. State, he successfully argued a landmark police brutality case to find then-cadet Saul Barnard guilty of Assault & Battery in the MRPD holding cells. He is also on record as closing one of the largest, if not the largest settlement in Los Santos history in a case of police negligence in June of 2021. Though rising the ranks to become Judge and Chief Justice are well within his sights, he will always remember his mission. In order to find more clues, he needs the right connections, and in order to find the right connections, he needs power, and in order to gain power, he will do what it takes, almost by any means necessary.

## Relationships

Eric Mars and Cletus & Betus McDowell are Sweets' OG partners. One day Sweets called the McDowell's for a taxi ride from the Yellow Pages just to have somebody to talk to, and spent hours in the cab just shooting the breeze and enjoying the company. The McDowell's often refer to Sweets as an honorary McDowell, and Sweets treasures this as one of his earliest and deepest connections in Los Santos. Later, Sweets met Ben Dover outside of Cluckin Bell just after Ben moved to Los Santos, and became the friend/brother Ben had been missing in the city after a rough start. The two used to share an apartment together and go on wild adventures through the countryside when they were off-duty from their respective lawyer and paramedic jobs, but a huge rift came between the two when Sweets was less-than-excited to see Ben bought his 3rd vehicle in 3 weeks. Having come from an impoverished background, the lavish display of wealth turned Sweets' stomach, and Ben took this very personally. Sweets was kicked out of the house after Ben left a chain of unanswered angry text messages. The two haven't spoken many words since.

Kamil Kowalski is Sweets' latest important connection- another lawyer with dedication and a good head on his shoulders. The two can often be seen in Devil's Den working on cases or outside of MRPD annoying the hell out of the police with questions and drip checks. The two have started a law firm together, S.H.A.G Attorneys-at-law, to handle more cases jointly and also train new lawyers to be successful in the DOJ system.

Sweets started up the livestock and dairy farm "Sweets' Meats" to provide more jobs in the outdoors and provide fresh produce for the city, in direct competition with the local grocery store. He named Tommy Long the new owner of the farm after getting the basics of the enterprise up and running, and now mentors him from the knowledge he gained from how his grandmother ran her farm. His latest project is getting a Community Service team up and running, where former felons actually have a chance to re-integrate into society and become a contributing member of the economy.