Ray Anderson

Ray in his LED motorcross outfit

Ray Anderson is a character played by StingRayzorBlade, depending on where you look.

## Description

Ray is a 22-year old naïve college grad with a knack for outdoor hobbies like hunting, fishing, and off-roading. He has a way of saying the wrong thing for the conversation at hand, but he tries his hardest to be a decent person. Ray recently graduated from Michigan State University in May of 2021. He had a job offer with a private company in Los Santos which required him to move in asap after graduation. However, he lost the job offer, with the only reasoning given by a copy-pasted email claiming that the company went bankrupt. He doesn't have the heart to tell his parents that the job fell through, so now he's stuck in LS trying to figure out what to do with himself.

## Life before Los Santos

Ray was born in Rochester, MI, a suburb of Detroit. He was raised by his parents, John and Jill Anderson. His dad John worked as a butcher and his mom Jill worked as a real estate agent. Growing up, his dad would regularly take him out hunting, fishing, and even driving ATV's and dirt bikes after he turned ten; they even rented jetskis once. There was little noteworthy about his primary education, other than that he was a diligent student. In high school, Ray picked up the unusual hobby of finding old, discarded arcade cabinets and trying to restore them to working order. He was rarely successful, but did manage to get a Tetris cabinet working for about an hour. He made a Pac-man cabinet playable, but the thing caught on fire and deterred him from the hobby for a while. That was, however, where he learned a bit about wiring and became interested in electronics. Ray is also apt at playing the drums, and is a fan of classic rock music, but also enjoys listening and playing to modern rock.

Ray attended college at Michigan State University, located in East Lansing, Michigan. While he was there, he majored in electrical engineering and minored in physics. His main extracurricular was being a member of the Baja Racing Team, an engineering project team that built a one-seater off-roader and brought it to competitions with other schools. From swamps in Texas to deserts in Arizona. Ray was more than willing to volunteer to drive the car to tear up the mud, sand, or whatever else he got to drive through. Once, the team made it to the world championship in Brazil, but did not go far in that bracket. Ray mostly worked on the wiring for the buggies, but he did learn the basics of how engines and transmissions work, and what goes into building a performance vehicle suited for off-roading. He continued to play the drums in a rock band by the name of 'Shot Lightning,' which was comprised of Ray and a few friends. They haven't been in contact since Ray moved to Los Santos.

The one other thing Ray did in college is something he rarely talks about, which is the research lab he was in as an undergrad. He helped work on a military-funded project that was attempting to create a handheld gauss gun. Being funded by the government, the military also gave their own specification they wanted for the weapon. Fortunately, according to Ray, or unfortunately, for the military, the lab never produced results that they were satisfied with, and during Ray's time on the project, they never created a finished product for the military. However, Ray realized that they could have practically exactly what they wanted, but it would just not be quite as powerful as their specifications stated. Due to his moral compass, and not wanting to help be a part of something that could destroy innocent lives, Ray developed the idea on paper but never actually created a prototype, or shared his notes. Ray continues to be torn up about the research, as he wants to help people, but is concerned that building such a weapon, even for "defense" reasons, would lead to innocent people getting hurt. A military representative put Ray in contact with the private company in Los Santos that would lead him to move there in the first place.

## Los Santos Adventures

### Settling into LS

Ray first arrived to Los Santos on May 28th, 2021, with little direction as for what to do with himself. Over the course of his first couple weeks, he started doing delivery driving to make a bit of money to live on, which he used to acquire a Manchez model motorcycle.

Ray also met a good number of folks around the city, including some of his friends, Louie Ritoni, Johnny Walker, Cupcake Garibaldi, and Natalia Stark. Unfortunately, the delivery service closed down in the city, so Ray kept his ears open for employment opportunities.

In addition, Ray saw some of what the dark side of the city has to offer to its civilians. In one of the first of what would turn into a string of bank robberies, Ray was kidnapped by a masked individual at gunpoint and forced into a hostage situation at a Fleeca Bank northwest of Los Santos proper. Although not criminal, Ray witnessed two locals acting very strangely around the impound lot across the street from Premium Deluxe Motorsport. Noticing a recent advertisement on Twitter for paranormal investigation by Cupcake, he called her over, and after retrieving Louie from Sandy Shores due to strange happenings with the now abandoned locals vehicles,' she arrived on the scene to investigate, leading to a series of strange sightings involving ghost cars near the scene. Ray was left with his logical mind scrambled and confused, but he has learned to keep an open mind in the past, and would continue to do so.

### Finding his place

Ray, Cupcake, and Louie, had been hanging around each other a lot at this point, and they decided to throw a party at the lighthouse, which Ray attended while wearing an outfit with yellow LED's in it, similar to what would become his normal, lime green, attire later. The party attracted much more attention than they had thought, even bringing in DJ Dirk Rockhard, and everyone also brought glowsticks. This party came to be known later that night as 'Glowhouse.' Ray would go to numerous parties over the course of the next couple weeks, where he made the acquaintance of Veronica Viotto and Alexander Ali.

Ray had developed the habit of taking his dirt bike and riding across the rural parts of the island, mostly north of the city. One of his favorite spots to go is the Redwood Lights Track, so when he learned about an upcoming motorcross event being hosted at his favorite track, he had to sign up, and practice beforehand. Although adept at riding dirt bikes, since he'd done it for about 12 years at this point, Ray managed to take a jump too high, and land hard on his bike, which they got caught on something and flung him into the ground, dislocating his right shoulder. Emergency services responded and the staff at Pillbox Medical Center were able to relocate the shoulder without issue. EMS William Roy, who arrived to take Ray to the hospital, and was also hosting the motorcross the following week, advised increased caution at the track while practicing, although Ray has since somewhat ignored that advice. At the motorcross event, Ray competed on a Sanchez model motorcycle provided by the city. It was a two lap race, and Ray was able to pull ahead after the first lap, and he came in first place, beating out the competitors by around 30 seconds.

Around the same time, Ray had recently found a few notable locations out in the countryside, one of which was a location actually desired by Cupcake Garibaldi. This location was an old, abandoned mine, which Ray, Cupcake, and Louie explored together. The location was certainly creepy to them, but at the time, it didn't seem overly dangerous. The other location, Ray discovered by chance. Ray was taking his dirt bike over many of the mountains, including Mount Chiliad, where he saw some strange graffiti, but the more notable mountain was Mount Gordo, where an apparition appeared to him between the hours of 11 pm and 12 am. He was frozen at first, but when it whispered in his ear from over 50 yards away, he left the area as quickly as he could.

However, upon hearing from Norm L. Guy, Natalia Stark, and others he hadn't met that a group of people were heading to Mount Gordo, Ray scrambled to the area, this time accompanied by Louie, to assure that people weren't trying to find the ghost, as he was concerned that it could be malevolent, or even violent, since it had appeared with a puddle of blood beneath where it was floating. Later that day, both Louie Ritoni and Cupcake Garibaldi bore witness to the same ghost, and dubbed it a banshee. They also discovered, together, that it was not a puddle of blood beneath it, but the word "JOCK" written in blood. They thought it could be a name, but couldn't pin it to any person or event they remembered.

Some time later, Cupcake Garibaldi reached out to Ray and Louie Ritoni, and she had the proposition of forming a paranormal investigation agency of sorts, and together, they settled on the name Glowhouse Paranormal Specialists, or GPS. Together, they reached out to Alistair Mulcahy and Dr Patrick Normal for more expertise.

### A re-settling into LS

Ray had gone on vacation back to Michigan to see his family, and when he arrived back in Los Santos, he quickly came to realize just how crazy the events of the time he'd been gone truly was. However, he was more focused on all of the new faces around the city, such as new additions to GPS, such as John Dors, River Trelawney, Coach Daniels, April Vonkeaton, Chase Doe, and Beth Frend. Ray got a tarot reading from River, who said he should trust his gut, but not burn himself out from constantly trying to make the right decisions. Oddly enough, Father Mulcahy, told him later that he should trust his gut, in a normal conversation, which stuck out as in interesting coincidence to Ray.

The events that had lead to Ray meeting the Father again were ones involved the mine again. Due to recent reports of demonic possession from the abandoned mine, which GPS has looked into more while Ray was away, they had decided to exorcise the area. River gave Ray a couple of incantations to say, so Ray assisted in the exorcism. What concerned him, however, is that he found Louie face-down in the dirt at the entrance to the mine, and heard him speak in a voice that didn't seem like his own. Ray chalked it up to the dirt he has inhaled at the time, but after hearing the strange voice again on several occasions since, Ray is not fully convinced of the exorcism's success.

Later that week, the group had been informed of strange, glowing blue objects in a run-down house out in the countryside, and when they went to investigate, Ray noticed they looked very familiar to some of the things he had seen in his time at the research lab, which deeply worried him that whatever place he had initially been hired to work at was still operating and researching something dangerous. Johnny took the group out to Humane Labs, where he apparently knew about, even though the area was out of the beaten path, and mostly fenced off.

The next day, GPS ran a party they had been planning known as 'Cave Rave' in the old mine, now safe from paranormal activity. The first hour of the party went smoothly, but when DJ Dirk Rockhard was shot in a suspected targeted attack, and then Johnny was shot attempting to pursue the culprit, the party closed down in chaos. Ray had to go into hiding along with the other GPS members awake at the time, in addition to several other groups in the city, to his knowledge, due to chaos breaking out all over Los Santos.

## Relationships

### Friends

* Louie Ritoni
* Cupcake Garibaldi
* Johnny Walker
* Natalia Stark
* Alistair Mulcahy
* Veronica Viotto
* Alexander Ali
* John Dors
* River Trelawney
* Beth Frend