AskRiversideCA

((If I'm typing within double parentheses, that means I'm speaking out of character!))

Human Name: Victor North Rivera
Gender: Male
Apparent Age: 23
Date of Settlement: 1870
Date of Incorporation: 1883
Height: 5’7”
Weight: 150 pounds

Appearance
The landscape of Riverside is characterized by shades of brown, and the same goes for Victor. His skin is the light brown of the omnipresent dust in the area, his hair is the darker brown of the local mountains (which is a mixture of rock and plant colors), and his eyes are a darker brown still. As if that weren’t enough, he often wears brown shorts or pants to match. He is not particularly tall, but fairly sturdy in build.
Victor is an example of that creature indigenous to the Inland Empire known as a “bro.” That is to say, he’s usually found wearing a flat-brimmed baseball cap, a tank top or muscle shirt, shorts with hems below his knees, black socks pulled halfway up his calves, and skate shoes. His face is sometimes accessorized by wrap-around shades and always adorned with a patch of hair on his chin that’s really too small to be called a proper goatee. His particular choice of tank top features the raincross logo of the City of Riverside, and his particular cap is blue with a yellow brim and a yellow C, representing the big concrete C on the Box Springs mountains overlooking the UC Riverside campus.

True to bro form, Victor has a lot of tattoos: the words “Inland Empire” across his chest; a cluster of orange fruit, leaves and blossoms with the words “Citrus City” below it on his right upper arm; the Mt. Rubidoux cross on his left upper arm; signs for the 215, 60, and 91 freeways on the outside of his left forearm; the area code “951” on the back of his left calf; and a bear in a kilt (that’s a coverup of a “909”) on the back of his right calf.


Personality
In a nutshell, Victor is a good person who makes a terrible first impression.
That first impression comes from a lot of things. For one, Victor is generally lazy, sometimes to the point of being outright apathetic. When he does overcome inertia enough to go do things, he’s less likely to be seen, so a first impression is most likely to be made while he is loafing. And then there’s the factor that, when he does do things these days, they’re generally pretty reckless things - skateboarding, BMX biking, ATV riding - which he follows up with a little too much drinking. He’s perpetually on the edge of hurting himself, but fancies himself a badass nonetheless. On top of that, his choice of clothing and his terrible tattoos paint a picture that is more stereotypically associated with delinquency than with being a fine upstanding citizen, even though the only things he’s broken have been by accident. His choice of language also leaves something to be desired: he calls everyone “brah” and curses so much that he doesn’t even realize he’s doing so. Charming, huh?

But the thing is, he knows that he’s a good city and a good person with legitimate history and skills, no matter how people may react to him once they have formed that first impression (and no matter how he may be too lazy to keep all of those skills honed). Which means, when people are quick to judge him, he gets very defensive. So, when someone calls him out on bad behavior, or says he’s a crappy meaningless suburb with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, he’s going to get loud and argumentative, which inevitably reinforces their impression that he’s no good. It’s a feedback loop of preconceptions and bad impressions, and it’s really not doing him any favors. Especially not compared to 100 years ago, when he was known as an elegant and cultured person/place to visit. But then again, that history is part of why he gets so defensive to begin with, even if it isn’t his reality anymore.

Supposing someone were to not mind that brash exterior, though, and they stuck with him enough to get to know him, they’d realize the first impression was wrong. Victor’s intentions are almost always good. He might be rude and loud and profane, but that’s just his way of interacting, and he doesn’t mean it to be offensive or insulting. It’s so default for him that he’s definitely a little clueless as to how people misinterpret it all the time. He is not out to get anyone, to destroy anyone’s ego, to bring down the quality of the neighborhood, to make a mess, to break things, to insult anyone’s principles, to buck the system, to assure his dominance, to hurt anyone or break anything. Not at all. His actual motivations are really pretty simple: to keep living his life, keep being a good city, and keep enjoying those things. He doesn’t do himself any favors by not telling everyone about all the things one can do within his city limits right off the bat, but if someone were to sit down and actually ask him what there is to do and where they should go to explore, that’s exactly the kind of thing that would stir him out of laziness and get him enthusiastic enough to go hang out with you while you do those things. That’s where the truth behind his assertion that he’s not a crappy meaningless suburb comes out.

Once Victor really considers you one of his bros (which is a different thing from how he calls everyone “brah,” and which does not depend on gender despite the word), he’s going to stick with you and back you up. When one of his bros needs help, he will go out of his way to help out. Even if things don’t get dire, just in hanging out, he likes to just talk and he likes to laugh about things, he likes to spend time outside, and he likes it when he learns something, even though he doesn’t necessarily go out with the aim to learn new things on a day to day basis. He also cares a lot about his citizens and neighbors, and wants to keep being a good place for them. When he screws up, once it’s called to his attention, he does feel bad about it (even though he may express that guilt belligerently as well). He is aware that he makes a bad impression, though he can’t put a finger on why, and he really wants to pull himself out of that, though he’s not necessarily sure how yet.

And there’s another thing that redeems him - underneath that laziness and acquired apathy, Victor is actually a very intelligent person. If he wasn’t, he couldn’t have become the innovator of the citrus industry that he was in the late 19th and early 20th century. But with the decline of that industry and the spread of suburbia that homogenized the whole Inland Empire, that’s when the laziness and apathy set in. He stopped focusing on intellectual pursuits, to the point where he just fell out of that mode of thinking. So, on the one hand, it’s an incredibly infuriating trait of his that he’s smart and just plain doesn’t do anything about it anymore. But on the other hand, that intelligence and resourcefulness does show through at unexpected times, and in situations that haphazard goofing around isn’t going to resolve. His recklessness has gotten him into many a mess, but his underlying intelligence has gotten him back out. He’s also coming to realize, with the top-notch research coming out of his local universities (and through his own studies - he’s currently enrolled at the University of California), and with the city government recently rebranding him as the City of Arts and Innovation, that he does want to live up to that standard. He still has to be told repeatedly to go do some of those cultural and science-y activities, but when he does go, he’s glad he did. He has a lot of entropy to overcome, which sometimes tests his resolve to do it, but he’s making progress, and the rate of progress is increasing with time.


Miscellanea
•Victor has a foul mouth, but he honestly doesn’t realize that he curses as often as he does. If you were to call him out on it, he’d be surprised.
•Citrus is SRS BZNS, and if you somehow got him to admit what he’s majoring in, it’s plant biology with a focus on citrus.
•He is the world’s biggest baby about the weather. He complains incessantly about the summers (with good reason: it’s routinely above 100F), but also thinks he’s about to die of hypothermia if it drops below 60F. Judging by his reaction to rain, you’d think he was related to the Wicked Witch of the West.
•Telling him that his river isn’t a river just because there’s no water in it is fightin’ words.


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