Rustin/Background

A Perfect Life
Rustin is the kind of guy that seems like a walking stereotype. Russet hair, green-eyed with a nice body, great smile and a fairly easy-going personality paints a picture of midnight bonfires at the beach, parties up in the hills and a fairly good life. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Growing up in Oceanside with two successful parents, a few siblings and a nice house should have been the formula for a perfect life. Both parents were consumed with a deeply-rooted need to succeed in their lives; to impress others and gain status and station at all cost and all of their children had to be just as impressive. When their middle child started hearing and seeing things that weren't there they, of course, sought the advice from the best medical experts. But more importantly, they saw to it that he was kept away from the public view as much as possible. If he was having a bad week, he'd be left home with a baby sitter as the parents and the other children attended social occasions to mingle and jingle with the powers-that-be in their beachfront lives. By the time he was able to get out of high school and away from his family he was able to finally get off the massive amounts of psychotropics and mood-stabilizers and vanished off to college.
College
Rustin didn't end up going to UC:P because of a number of reasons. He did manage to get into one of the smaller, community colleges in the county and was thankfully able to move away from his parents. He majored in business with a minor in psychology and enjoyed himself fairly well. While on campus he came across one of the many fliers that plaster the campus trying to attract students for cheap and easy money by filling our a survey or volunteering to be a research subject for some psychological experiment. Trying to live his own life on his own terms meant that he could really use the cash so he signed up. The research was focused around human perception and intuition and he didn't take it all that seriously at first. They would show him cards of symbols and he'd guess the right one or they would tell him that there was something hidden under one of a number of different solid shapes and he would have to draw which one he thought the thing was hidden under. He took the test, got the money and left without a second thought. A week later, he got a phone call that changed his life.