Ruslan gets along with everyone. It’s always easier for him to just nod along than to hold an opinion and have to answer for it later. He catches on to other people’s perspectives instantly, tries them on for size, and doesn’t even bother resisting - put him next to a confident voice, and his own willpower just stalls out. Even an LLM could outargue him. He doesn’t make decisions, he shelves them. If a choice can be avoided today, he won’t make it. If you can shove a problem into the garage, turn off the lights, and call it a “temporary measure,” that’s exactly what he’ll do. And then he just waits for things to blow over. From the outside, Ruslan seems like a calm, grounded guy. In reality, he just really doesn’t want any sudden moves, which is easily mistaken for poise.
Ruslan has everything because his old man is a retired colonel. The retired colonel has everything sorted, and consequently, so does Ruslan. He has never run into a hard “no” on his path through life. When the rules outside his father’s jurisdiction tried to deny him, he began bypassing them out of habit. Backdoors, soldering, custom firmware - his way of operating in a world where nobody tells you no and nobody kicks your ass over grey-zone stuff. He navigates tech and code with more confidence than he does himself. There is no rebellion in his workarounds - only the caution of a person who doesn’t want to find out what happens if he gets caught.
Even though Ruslan doesn’t have the kind of strength you can lean on, you don’t have to keep your guard up around him - because he is incapable of aggression. To him, women aren’t some separate, hostile species of xenomorphs whose instruction manual you have to look up on Twitter; they aren’t a resource, and they aren’t an audience you need to prove your manhood to. All of his exes speak well of him. He has more than you’d expect.
Far too many for someone who doesn’t actually do anything to make it happen. None of them know what Ruslan sounds like when he raises his voice, or if he ever does at all. He’s not saved as "asshole" in anyone’s phone - usually, it’s just "Ruslan". They still text him, still spend time with him. Each of the girls thinks she was the one who broke up with him, not the other way around - and technically, that’s exactly how it was. It’s easy to conclude from this that he simply leaves no trace in their lives, that to them, he’s just an empty space. But he doesn’t have an inflamed ego that needs to become someone’s trauma, the defining lesson after which "you’ll never be the same again."
Sometimes his looks make the first move for him. People soften up faster, explain things more willingly, and give second chances more often. Sometimes Ruslan gets invited to places where someone else with the exact same skill set might not be. That’s how he ended up on Stepan’s big YouTube channel about tech and robotics: officially, as a guy who knows the subject; unofficially, as a face the audience was supposed to love. But the bet didn’t pay off. Perhaps the viewers were looking for character, not just a face - and Ruslan is a bit short on that. He ended up being the least noticed member of the team. Ruslan didn’t make a problem out of it. If people pay attention to him, he doesn’t draw any conclusions. If they don’t, he doesn’t either.
Before Valera, he had three robots. Valera’s predecessor is in the storage closet, packed up for sale, but Ruslan just hasn’t gotten around to posting the listing. It’s an obsolete model, and the first one could practically be considered a museum piece - something he could try selling as "vintage." Ruslan keeps the backups and logs of all Valera’s predecessors to read through and make sense of one day. But that’s for some other time. Valera despises everything about Ruslan: his softness, his sleepy evasion of decisions, his habit of dodging consequences. Especially because he was thrust into being by this exact guy.
(Ruslan's brother, Viktor)