Randall Huntford

Randall Huntford

the basics

Randall James Huntford • (add preferred name if different from legal or birth name)

nicknames • Boss, Big Bad, Randy (by his wife alone) Alpha

age • 45

primary standing • Soldier and Weapons Officiant

secondary standing • Zootopia informant

faction • Cursed Thorns

species •  Anthropomorphic Wolf

gender • Male

sexuality •Heterosexual

the appearance

origin • Zootopia

height and weight • 5'9 at the ears, 180lbs

overall appearance •Considerably large does his species; a tall, intimidating bulk of dark grey fur. Has a crooked, grizzled snout with a large nose and impressively white teeth. Wears a thick black greatcoat over his blue Howling Winds Diner buttondown shirt and a pair of pale khakis. His eyes are a brown so dark they're almost black.

the personality

likes • Control, competition, winning, driving, working with his paws, weapons enthusiast, efficiency, power, and respect given to himself and his family, good food, security.

dislikes • Being talked back or down to, losing, being second-best, insecurity of family wealth and safety, and polar bears.

strengths • Intimidating, strong and winsome authoritative figure, inspires loyalty, sharp memory, and an experienced businessman as well as fist fighter.

weaknesses • Raging temper which, once out of control, turns reckless and heedless. Prejudiced against anyone who is not a wolf, and favors members of his own Pack. Can't handle being second-best and doesn't know when to quit; ambition is his folly. 

dreams • To rule the criminal kingdom of Tundratown and utterly humiliate Mr. Big and his associates. Short step from there to wanting to rule the whole crime system of Zootopia, all in the name of security for his loved ones and elevation of his own reputation.

fears • Fears losing his family or losing his pack. Fears a lack of control over their security, and fears embarrassment.

overall personality • Randall is a charming, if overbearing natural leader. His pride is his biggest character trait: it manifests itself in wanting to not only be the best, but reap the benefits for his family. He fears a lack of control over the wellbeing of himself and those he trusts and cares about, and takes that responsibility too far. Deeply engrained into Randall is a sense of the unfairness which his own species is treated with by other animals. Therefore, he firmly lives by the creed that a Pack watches their back, because nobody else will.

To Randall, the world owes him something, and he will go out and take it by working smarter instead of harder and proving that might makes right. He does this through manipulation of strength in numbers, but genuinely cares about the select few in his gang, made up of mostly young or similarly insecure wolves who look up to his rugged charisma and confidence. He is gruff, and puts what he believes is best for his family over their feelings.

Randall's desire to work around the system originated with insecurity, a belief that he had to do whatever it took to provide for his family. That has warped over the years to include ambition bordering on obsession: he believes the only way for his family and livelihood can ever be safe is if he proves that he's Top Dog to anyone and everyone who looks down upon him.

the history

father • Lyle Huntford, aged 50, deceased.

mother • Tala, aged 24, deceased.

siblings • Lowell Huntford, brother, 18, deceased.

important people •

Payton Huntford, wife, 40, co-leader of Rush Pack operations by night and saucily sweet Diner operator by day.

Raoul Huntford, son, 11, paralytic troublemaker helping around the Diner.

Connor Huntford, son, 20, estranged and denouncing of family business, runaway.

Mr. Big, Randall's self-proclaimed rival for the criminal underground of Tundratown and the focus of his prejudices against all non-wolves.

The Rush Pack (Vincent Fangmire, Shamus and Marcus Lupe, "Longtooth" Morris, Ralph Snoutworth, Rudy Greyson, Phelan Bristle, Borris and Lovetta Hacklemore, the Shaw Twins.)

overall history •
Randall was born in Tundratown. His father was a depressed, easily downtrodden wolf who took the drudgery of his work out on anyone who crossed him, though never his family. Randall’s Mother was a day of sunshine, but she was sick. She instilled in Randall the inspiration that carried him through high school and college to a degree in business, despite adversity and prejudice against wolves, long after she died. Randall’s brother, Lowell, was always wayward. He often got in trouble with the law and even one night claimed he’d tried to join a local gang run by someone named Mr. Big. Randall and his father tried time and again to get Lowell on the right track, but the young wolf only kept getting into messes out on the icy streets.

Randall’s father wanted him to get a job at the same local dive bar he was employed at, a safe if minimum-wage position at Icicle’s Drip. But Randall believed he could do more. He moved to Deerbuck county, insistent on getting away from his dead-end father who had no ambition and his loser brother.

Randall met Payton in Deerbuck. At the time, she was visiting relatives for the summer, while her home was in Savannah Central in Zootopia. Initially, he found her to be fierce competition; she was managing a entrepreneurial horse’s diner and her charm and ease with customers made their establishment the go-to-place for predator clients in the small town. Randall was trying to get a chain of bars started, and found her too irritatingly good at her job even while he was attracted to her success despite being a fellow wolf. Everywhere he tried to make a new beginning in the town, whether it was at the poker tables or even the County Fair’s sharpshooting contest, Payton seemed to be there, already doing it. Publicly the two wolves glared daggers at each other, but in their hearts, each fueled the other’s efforts. Randall barked that he couldn’t wait for her to go back to Zootopia and looked forward privately to seeing her every day.

One day Randall was coming home from another failed attempt at buying a building for his chain; the properties he looked at were in a bunny-heavy part of town and none of the little hoppers trusted a wolf to run a successful business. He was grumbling to himself over this when two oxen decided they’d had enough of his skulking around their town and jumped him. Randall fought them, finding a brutish strength in himself he’d never let loose with. He snapped one’s horn off and gave the other a lovely black eye before they beat him senseless. The last thing Randall saw before blacking out was one big galoot going down for seemingly no reason, then another very clearly getting hit with a high-powered elephant tranq dart. In the silhouette of a street light three blocks down, he recognized Payton’s figure. He woke to her cleaning him up. She was in tears, and when he smugly pointed it out, she hit him harder than either ox had and fiercely informed him that it was because she had to return to Zootopia at the end of the week. Randall decided he couldn’t do with that and proposed on the spot around a fat lip and through a bloodied snout.

Randall and Payton were struggling as newlyweds in Deerbuck County. Proud as he was of his education, Randall could only manage to land a farmhand job or three to put food on the table. Payton was pregnant and instead of being excited he was nauseous. How could he fill this desperation to provide for the new family, yawning in his heart like a black hole? While angering over this, he got a call from his father in Tundratown. Aging Mr. Huntford had been grievously hurt in a work accident—the shift manager at Icicle’s Drip said he’d been working overtime and tried to do too much on his own.

With a displaced feeling of guilt accompanying his latest failure to start his own business, Randall reluctantly moved back to Tundratown with Payton. They were too late. Mr. Huntford passed away within a week of his eldest son’s return. Bitter, Randall decided to buy the Icicle’s Drip, though it was Payton’s idea. At first, the owner wouldn’t sell. In their first meeting, he made a snide comment about Randall’s father, saying that a wolf’s legs weren’t made for climbing the food chain.

Randall saw red. His paws were red when he left the meeting five minutes later. Icicle’s Drip’s owner had red dripping from his snout and ears when he signed the paperwork, and red stained the deed to the building, but Randall passed it off as a coffee stain to anyone who wondered. He was the proud owner of the place his father had worked at all his life, now transformed from dive bar into Howling Winds Diner, Payton’s idea. She turned it into a family establishment where blue-collar predators from all around the icy district came for good cooking.

It wasn’t enough. They couldn’t corner the prey market, even with Randall trying to make partnerships with the produce peddlers and fish markets on Main Street every day in his delivery truck. Their newborn son, Connor, rode along with every day, but even the sight of a cute kid couldn’t soften the public opinion of a fearsome looking wolf like the owner of the diner. Their financial strain was dire when Payton revealed she was pregnant for the second time.

Randall realized how close he was to ruin. The diner wasn’t making enough money and Connor seemed to be always hungry—he was scrawny for a wolf pup, too, and Randall knew he couldn’t afford to take the kid for a checkup, much less pay for more food.

Then Lowell showed up. Randall’s brother was bedraggled, leaner than he remembered, and had a wild look in his eye. He told Randall in a rush that he’d finally managed to join Mr. Big’s ranks, though the crime boss reportedly only hired polar bears for muscle and rarely wolves. Lowell insisted that he cared about his big brother and urged him to join on a job they were supposed to do the next night. At first Randall refused. Then Raoul, his second-born, had his accident. He was paralyzed from the waist down, and both Connor and Payton were frenzied. Stricken with the weight of responsibility, Randall joined his brother.

They pulled off a shady job, but one that paid for Raoul’s medical bills. Lowell shouldn’t have included anyone else; he was supposed to do this job alone, but he swore to keep his big brother’s help a secret from his boss, and without Randall’s quick, knacks thinking they never would have pulled it off. Randall didn’t want anything more to do with Mr. Big. He told himself it was because of the shrew’s criminal status, but really...it was because he chafed under being told what to do by Big’s Polar Bears.

Payton wanted to know where the money came from. She figured it out, and Randall prepared for a fight. Instead, she revealed that her father had been the ringleader of a Savannah Central illegal fight club, and was no stranger to crime. She told Randall that she believed for some mammals, getting ahead was a matter of climbing, but for wolves, it was climbing, clawing, and biting. She had his back.

Lowell showed up on their doorstep again. This time he was hurt, beaten within an inch of his life, and collapsed. He never returned to consciousness, but in his fevered state Randall gathered he had been killed by a Polar Bear, either working for Mr. Big or mixed up in Lowell’s business with the shrew. Payton assumed however he’d been killed was the fault of Lowell’s foolish, greedy ways, and Randall knew that description fit his brother perfectly. But in his grief, he blamed Mr. Big.

Randall turned to crime himself from that point on, but unlike Lowell, the older Huntford was shrewd. He grew a gang assembled loosely of young wolves, usually fatherless or shiftless. They were drawn to the diner after dark, when Payton created a special “wolves happy hour” event. There they heard Randall denouncing other predators, praising their species, insisting that wolves had to look out for other wolves. Hinting that Mr. Big shouldn’t be running the dark business in Tundra Town.

Payton covered for her husband at night by running an increasingly family-focused establishment during the day. Meanwhile, he was flourishing, organizing his wolves and intercepting shipments of catnip and anise (illegal in Zootopia) and dealing high-powered tranq and tazer guns throughout the city under the table. Once or twice, they skirmished with Mr. Big, but it only fueled Randall’s increasing dislike of the other syndicate, so much bigger and wealthier and dangerous than his own ragtag Pack. To the public, Randall Huntford was a hearty, laughing, tough businessman. But to the local wolves, he was a leader into the deepest, darkest corners of glory the streets could give.

Connor grew up, but didn’t get much bigger. Despite being older than some of the Rush Pack recruits his father employed, he was the smallest adult in the pack. Randall refused to allow his hungry kid to join in on gang activity and assigned him delivery truck duty instead. They got into many heated debates and arguments, but what Randall said went. His upstart mouth and ambition was putting dangerous thoughts of grandeur in paralyzed Raoul’s head, too, so Randall grew a short fuse with his firstborn.

One argument in particular stood out. Randall had caught wind of Big sending polar bears to some lot in Tundratown, in what he considered wolf territory, to meet up with a businessman under cover of night. Randall decided, in a bold move, to interrupt this meeting and rough up the polar bears with Rush Pack Numbers, get a message to Big. He was preparing to leave for this when Connor insisted on coming and helping. He revealed he’d been taking boxing lessons to toughen up and prove he could be useful. Randall exploded and squashed his eldest’s hopes, then left.

Their skirmish wasn’t going well—even five wolves were little match for two of Mr. Big’s finest. But then Connor came on the scene, savage, and attacked with teeth and claws like a monstrous brute. It was like nothing Randall had ever seen before, and when he learned it was because of the Assistant Mayor’s plot later on after Connor was found and cured, it didn’t matter. He was convinced Connor could be useful to the Pack after all, and just in time, because Big would no doubt strike back at the Rush Pack.

But Connor wasn’t into it anymore. Going savage made him soft; or maybe it was his crush on the schoolteacher Colleen DunBark from the Merged Worlds. Just when Randall was trying to bully and speechify his son into hitting Mr. Big again before the shrew got them, Colleen stumbled onto the family’s criminal secret. Randall ignored Connor’s protests and ordered his Pack to go after the collie before she sold them out. She’d disappeared—and not long after, so did Connor.

But not without a parting gift.

Connor had betrayed his parents. He’d kidnapped his younger brother and left the city without a word, except to the ZPD, who had been tipped off by the youngest and launched a full scale investigation on the owners of the Howling Winds Diner.

Payton handled the situation far better than dumbfounded Randall. She barely managed to throw the police off their scent, or at least buy them time, with quick lies. But Randall knew they had to lay low for a while...and in the meantime, he decided to leave the city with his Pack. Payton could watch the Diner. He would go get their boys...and maybe scope out some new allies. It was time the Rush Pack thought bigger than Tundratown—or so the envoys from the Cursed Thorns, speaking on behalf of Bellwheather, claimed. Randall decided this was a win-win. He could get some connections with the dark army and find not only his bonehead of a son, who needed some sense pounded into him, but also maybe even that nosy dog. And if he got to meet the creator of that Night Howler Serum that made his kid so useful? Bonus.

the role player

alias • SmilePirate

age • 24

pronouns • She, her

how did you find us? • My sister
other characters •Nala, Prince Charming, Eric, Jasmine, Randall Huntford