William Baker

## Personality

William Baker could be defined as a man looking for something that lasts. He’s loyal, dedicated and respectful to the people he’s close to and when it comes to his goals, he’s quite a determined fellow. While he possesses a slightly gruff exterior at times, he is a pretty caring guy. Furthermore, many are surprised by his artistic side, showing an appreciation on creation and structure. At the same time, this is reflective of his thoughts on the nature of how long things last.

At the same time, he’s rough for a reason. His upbringing left him placing a certain value on the importance of wealth and material possessions, though his background in poverty means that this perspective is one of necessity and not just greed. Furthermore, his short temper can lead him to make impulsive mistakes and he can be pretty blunt and even brutish with his approach. He’s a man who’s looking for a big score to make up for the problems of his past, but he struggles with what that means, even with money. Ultimately, he’s not a bad man, but a man forced into a complicated situation due to poor choices and circumstances and with the buried, but still present hope of turning his life around and making it big.

## Powers & Abilities

***Sand Assimilation*-** After the accident, Willam Baker gained the ability to assimilate sand (i.e. granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles, defined by size, being finer than gravel and coarser than silt) into his very being by mental command. His brain attained subliminal awareness of all granulated particles, assimilated or otherwise. Through conscious effort, he can affect the degree of molecular cohesion between the numerous adjoining surfaces of his particles and thus cause locomotion of discrete volumes, down to the individual grains.

* ***Sand Density Control:*** He can compact or loosen the particles of sand that make up his form. This allows him to control the density of his composition, allowing him to be as hard as stone or flow like loose sand. A favorite tactic of the Sandman is making himself slightly dispersed when an opponent punches him and sink into him and then making himself rock-solid again, entrapping his opponent's appendage.
* ***Sand Shape-Shifting:*** He could shape his sand-state body into any continuous shape he can imagine, including his forearms into weapons like hammers, spiked maces, and large fists, forming ram horns on his head, stretching, elongating, deforming, expanding, flattening, or compressing all or portions of his body at will, phase through small openings, etc.
* ***Reformation:*** The Sandman maintained mental control of the particles of which his body is composed so that he could reform his scattered grains unless a substantial portion of his body mass has been isolated.
* ***Superhuman Strength:*** Due to having cognitive control over every sand particle in his bidy and able to subliminally utilize it to mimic additional muscle mass along with augment it, Sandman possesses phenomenal superhuman strength.
* ***Sand Conversion:*** He could also convert common grains of sand around him into constituents of his body to replenish portions he might lose track of during battle. In this manner, he could increase his overall size and volume (to some as yet unknown limit), or that of his limbs.

## History

### Baker Born

William Baker was born the only son of the Bakers over in 1965 in a lower class neighborhood in Queens. Floyd Baker would end up leaving his family when William was a toddler and leaving his wife to descend into alcoholism. As such, William would be a latchkey kid during his time growing up and having to avoid troublemakers. However, he would end up becoming a trouble maker himself as he would find himself naturally skilled in theft. Growing up impoverished, his theft was mainly for necessities or money for doing so. Despite this, William did possess some happy memories of his childhood and perhaps his favorite memories was when his mother was sober and able to take him over to the beach. William found another talent for himself; he was very capable in creating sand sculptures. One day, William built a large and detailed sand castle only to watch it wash away when it started to rain. The young Baker boy became determined that he was going to make something that would last. William took his love of making things out of sand and used it for school art projects. This was inspired by his art teacher, Miss Flint, whom he grew a crush on. However, he would be heartbroken when she would leave teaching upon marrying a stockbroker.

Due to his poverty, Baker would find himself a target of bullying at the time, especially when combined with his interests in the arts. Eventually, he retaliated against the bullies and he beat them, making them afraid of him. This would lead to him becoming more aggressive and confrontational, sometimes even becoming a bully himself. He would channel this newfound sense of confidence by joining the football team in high school and seemingly on track to try and turn his life around, even getting a girlfriend in Marcy. However, it would all come crashing down when an incident involving his coach. An argument escalated and it would result in William assaulting his coach. By the end of the ordeal, William wound find himself expelled at the age of 17 in 1982. With his future now in seemingly ruins, he turned to crime with some of the remnants of his gangs and before long, he would end up in jail. However there, he would meet none other than Floyd Baker, his father. Over the next few years, he would bond with his father although without telling that he was his son, introducing himself as Flint Marko. He would commit various robberies over time, but he would find he would not be able to get the big score that he so wanted. Around this time, he would become something of a drifter and trying to find something to do with his life.

### Becoming Flint Marko and a Father

Everything changed when he met her. A whirlwind romance began between Emma and William Baker over at the time. This was thanks to how they both grew up poor and struggled to make a name for themselves. Flint struggled to go straight during the time, but he still had some black marks that would make it difficult to get his GED, not that it stopped him. He never told his wife over of his criminal background, at least outside of petty crime (since she herself did some as a teenager). Furthermore, Emma’s family never accepted him wholly, believing he is hiding something. The two would get marriec His life would begin turning further more with the birth of his daughter… Penny Susan Baker. Penny was a sickly child however, having born with a type of cancer. Treatment would be possible, but it would cost a fortune.

Desperate to save the life of his child, he decided to go back to crime to get the funds needed. Unfortunately, he would be imprisoned and further complications would lead to the estrangement between him and Emma. Despite that, she never divorced him. However, he would learn through his crime connections of some illicit experiments going on with the potential of earning some vast income in short periods of time. He went to the site of these people offering the experiments and in exchange of providing funds for the treatment, he would take place in an experiment that would supposedly augment his human body with mineral armor, binding it to him. He suspected that part of the arrangement would be him working for them if he survived the encounter.

He entered the cell before it was filled up with an oxygen-rich liquid enabling him to breath normally. In the cell, the plan was for him to be bombarded with large amounts of minerals while the liquid would be irrdated with the energy of a crude Vita-Ray generator, the idea being that heat and Vita radiation would enable the vast quantities of minerals to bind to his body safely and with the hopes of allowing him to turn it on and off. However, the crude construction of the generation meant its instability would result in an explosion within the containment apparatus and with Baker seemingly dead. Rather than risk being caught, the experimenters abandoned the laboratory and planned to have agents come to dispose of the body.

Only to find no body.

### Rise of the Sandman

However, through means unknown at the time, Baker did survive. While not gaining a mineral-based exoskeleton that was intended with the experiment, something better came of it. His body could now absorb and assimilate sand, allowing him to control it and thus able to reconstitute himself. After spending a bit of time practicing, he realized that he possessed plenty of capabilities. Realizing what he could do with his new powers, he decided he could finally make his big score, for himself and for his daughter. Of course, he was not sure what he could really do with these powers. Lacking a sense of direction, he fell back to his old habit with his crime connections and decided that one way could be by dealing with the so-called Spider-Man.

## Trivia

* William Baker does not have a driver’s license as his form of identification.

* His desire for a “big score” may stem from an incident on his childhood where a large detailed sand castle melted away from a large tidal wave. As he would later say, it made him realize how art and beauty could be washed so easily and wants to find something to last.

* During Miss Flint’s final day of teaching, she spent a bit of time with him, leading to Baker meeting her fiancee. During a brief moment alone, the young Baker asked the man why she was leaving from teaching. The man explained the importance of financial security and that is the duty of a good man to provide said security to his family regardless of what’s needed, referring to how thanks to his success, Miss Flint could afford to focus on her family full-time. Baker took the advice the heart and served as a foundation for acquiring his "big score."

* He got the name Flint from his teacher and the false surname in Marko as a callback to how his football coach said he would never “make a mark on this world.”

* He gave his daughter her middle name after his own mother out of sentimentality.

* Despite how his relationship fell apart with his ex-wife, there is still a level of care between them and some lingering feelings of longing between the two for one another.

* Besides his father, Marko met Peter Petruski in prison, being his cellmate and the two bonded and became relatively good friends, remaining in contact even after they busted out of prison.

* The funds for his daughter’s operation were indeed delivered to her, but under the guise of a charity event sponsored by Oscorp of all companies. While he was relieved by this, he was also wondering if this meant the experiments or its conductors were connected to Oscorp.

* During the illicit experiment that he was added to, he signed himself off as “William Baker” due to believing the experiment was government-sanctioned at the time. This allowed him to go unnoticed by the conductors of the experiment since they thought he died. He vanished before the clean-up crew arrived.

* Prior to the experiment, Sandman had a backup plan to earn money. Days prior while beach-combing, he located a strange blue crystal the size of a pecan on the underside of a rock, which he put in his pants' pocket. He planned to sell the crystal to earn some more money though the crystal appeared to have disappeared and been incorporated into him...