R Gervasio

Robertina / Robert Gervasio

An Iraq War vet who has been living rough but knows a lot of folks at Decameron

Gender: Male Current Quality: Good

In Game

Plots: Project Sureshot, The Drug Trade

Bluesheets:

Character Hint

You are Robert Gervasio, an Iraq War vet who has been living rough in Violet City for the past few years. It's been hard, holding on to your pride through that, but you've managed to never shatter quite as badly as some of your friends in the park.

The folks at Decameron Enterprises have been good to you for the past year or so -- not just giving you handouts, but actually making friends. Roger Cameron even talked about finding a job for you. But now he and others are dead at Seamus' hand, and the shakes are back: you were right there when that poor girl got shot, and all you could do was hide. This is going to be one of the bad days...

Costuming here should be measured: you have been sleeping rough for a long time, and that should show, but you've also tried to keep your pride.

Character Sheet

You are Robert Gervasio, and you thought you had the shakes under control -- dammit, they're not shooting any more, they're not shooting at you, stop the shaking and people are talking to you and you're supposed to talk back to them but you don't know what to say and dammit, they aren't supposed to be shooting here, they told you that there wouldn't be shooting back here in Violet City, that you're not in the sandbox any more and

Stop. Calm.

You are Robert Gervasio, and there was a time when you had dreams for your life. You were mostly a jock in high school, but not stupid, and Violet City U gave you a scholarship for freshman year. That was pretty great -- college was a hell of a party, and your grades weren't even too bad. But you discovered that the hot-shit football player in high school was only kinda so-so in college, and once they were no longer giving you the football scholarship, college was just plain too expensive. So you enlisted.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. You were strong, fit and disciplined, and the country needed its best men and women to help out in Iraq. And the worst of the war was supposed to be over already -- by the time you got there, Saddam was long since gone, and everyone was there to help with nation-building. "Nation-building". Makes it sounds so organized and purposeful, not a morass of bombs and chaos.

The truth is, you did well with the army -- the people were mostly good, the discipline worked for you. And you really enjoyed the missions that seemed to be about actually helping people -- even the grunt-labor construction stuff seemed like you were productive.

But too often, you were under fire. Twice you were in a humvee that came close enough to an IED to be damaged. You can't count the number of times your unit came under fire, although the closest you came to actually getting hurt was some shrapnel in your arm a year or two in.

You wound up staying on for three tours, and did pretty well -- you were a Corporal by the time you mustered out. You were done: too many years over there, taking their toll. But then you got home, and it was almost worse, because as you found, it wasn't home any more.

You tried to fit in, you really did. But the nightmares were almost constant, which left you tired at every job you tried. And your temper -- you're not an angry person. You've never been an angry person. But it all seemed to trivial, and the less important things were, the more people seemed to focus on them. But no one wanted to hear that, they just wanted to stay coccooned in their little worlds, not understanding how much bigger and more dangerous it all can be, and it was so hard to sit there and listen to it and

Stop rocking. It makes you look crazy, and you aren't crazy.

You don't remember how long it took before the money ran out, just -- one summer night, there wasn't any money and you'd been kicked out of your apartment, and you just sat down in the park and cried. That was hard: you were always raised not to cry. And you never really left that park.

The summers and winters can be hard, and you learned to swallow your pride in the dead of winter and use the shelter. It's crowded and dehumanizing -- you always feel that much more pathetic there, and it's hard. The Army taught you to be proud of everything you did, and there is no pride here.

It's been a while now. Three years? Four? Five? The calendar stops mattering after a while. Your life became all sameness, until the day Jeri found you.

She showed up with a crowd of people behind her, and you shied away at first. You learn, on the street, to distrust crowds -- you are tougher than most, but even you have been beaten up by gangs, and had you meager possessions robbed. But this was a crowd of reporters, following the Mayor around -- she was meeting and talking to the city's homeless. You were suspicious at first, but warmed up when it became clear that she was sincere. You fell into a real conversation about life on the street, and much to the impatience of the people with the cameras, talked for a long time.

What really surprised you was when she came back the following week, to continue to talk without all the cameras around. And it became a habit: once a week, she would sneak away from the state house, find you in the park, and you would talk, sometimes for hours. The truth is, you've come to like her, probably too much. You know that you are broken, and she is never going to think of you as more than a curiosity, or a friend at best. But even that contact helps.

Last year, she introduced you to Roger Cameron at Decameron Enterprises, across the street from the park. You could tell that he was wary at first, but you actually kind of hit it off. He was genuinely interested in your life. He was kind of too fond of the guns, and loved to ask you about how the weaponry actually worked in the field.

Better yet, he introduced you to his office manager, Samuel Antonino, who was very kind to you. He has encouraged you to visit the office any time it is open, and to make full use of the lunchroom and facilities, both of which have been godsends. In the cold months, a free cup of coffee in the morning made you feel a little more human. And being able to take showers in the company locker room even more so. And the people have been friendly to you (mostly), and made you feel like part of society again.

Their kindness has been wonderful, although sometimes you wonder if it might have its own hidden curse. A while after you'd started hanging around Decameron, Shrivatsa Kiran came up to you and offered you a pill bottle. You protested that you weren't a drug addict, not like some of the people in the park, but he told you that he was offering to give it to you to sell. He had hurt his back a couple of months earlier, and while he'd gotten better fairly quickly, they'd given him some oxycontin for the pain. He had heard that it was worth a good deal of month on the street, so he was giving it to you so you could get some cash.

That was weird, and disturbing; you didn't want to become some sort of drug dealer. But he pointed out that this wouldn't hurt anybody. He didn't have any use for the pills, there were people who did need them, and you needed the money. He pushed the bottle into your hands.

You slept on it, out on your park bench, tortured by the knowledge of how nice it would be to have a little money for once, more than you got from panhandling. And the next day, you found one of the dealers -- there are several around the park, everyone knows them -- and asked how much he'd give for it. He looked at the bottle, examined the pills carefully, and asked where you got them; you refused to answer, and just asked whether he wanted them or not. He shrugged, and offered you a hundred dollars. You took it.

Since then, this has become a more regular thing than you'd like to admit. About once a month, Shrivatsa complains about his back, and gets another prescription; he gives it to you; you sell it; and you give him back the copay. (You insist on that.) No violence, nobody gets hurt, but you still feel pretty uneasy about it all. Last week, one of the cops in the park spotted you selling the pills, and you were afraid you would get arrested, but you managed to run off before you were caught.

So things have been getting better -- until this morning.

You were sitting around the lunchroom this morning, a fairly random group of you -- Shrivatsa, Ainsley, Isaiah Zubin and him daughter Amy. Ainsley was explaining that she had convinced her father to set up Take Your Daughter to Work Day, which was why Amy was there.

When you heard the first shot, you froze up. You really weren't sure -- it had to be a shot, but it didn't sound quite right. Everyone else was surprised, but didn't seem scared, so you thought you were just imagining things. The second one, louder, you were sure, but had no idea what to do. Part of you screamed to dive under the table. Your army training told you to take command, get the civilians to safety, but you aren't in the Army any more, and they aren't civilians, and this isn't the sandbox, and then you saw Seamus with the gun in his hand, and before you could even move Amy had jumped up and he'd shot her and it was just like Baghdad, seeing her dead on the floor, and you were just rocking, trying not to think and there were people trying to get you to move but you didn't want to and

Stop. Calm.

Who You Know

Jeri Ferdinand: The Mayor of Violet City, and weirdly, your closest friend. You have feelings for her, but know that you mustn't act on them: you can't afford to drive away the person who most treats you as a real human being.
Roger Cameron: The CEO of Decameron Enterprises. A good man, although he probably wouldn't be so fond of guns if he had seen all that you have.
Samuel Antonino: Kind and gentle, the Office Manager has never been anything other than good to you. A few months ago, he admitted that, many years ago, he had come under fire from some sort of crazy shooter, so he understands a little of how you feel. He had nightmares for years, but they went away eventually. You wouldn't want to wish this on anyone, but it's somehow comforting to not be alone in it.
Shrivatsa Kiran: A kind young man from India who works at Decameron, and who has been providing you with pills to sell.
Ainsley Cameron: Roger's daughter -- a sweet and eager girl. A smile from her is sometimes the best part of your day: she reminds you that things can be good.
Rhona Finlay: One of the police who keep an eye on the park. You think it may have been her who chased you off last week, but you aren't sure. (In uniform, it's harder to tell the police apart.)
Seamus O'Malley: Another of the engineers. He has always been a nice guy -- it's almost impossible to think of him as a killer. You knew killers, and you never saw that in his face, not even when he was there with the gun.
Paula Vasilios: Another engineer -- a really nice, gentle person.
Jonathan Sheena: He started at Decameron recently -- maybe a month or two ago. He was a stranger, so you were cautious around him at first, but he turned out to be surprisingly nice. He even joined you in the park one evening a few weeks ago, and just hung out and talked, like two ordinary guys. It was strange, but kind of great: it reminded you of what things were like before joining the army.
Isaiah Zubin: Amy's father. Poor Amy. You see her lying there, with Isaiah cradling her body, and it's horrible, it's like you saw so many times in Iraq, sometimes even with your team responsible for killing some poor girl and it was your fault and you feel so
Stop. Calm.

GM Notes

Likely has been struggling with some PTSD and depression; not terrible compared to some, but was beginning to spiral down. Struck up an accidental friendship with one or more members of Decameron, and has sort of become a company mascot. Was friends with Roger, after a fashion.

Sie was in the office, getting hir daily coffee when Seamus' rampage started. Sie was torn between reflexes saying to jump into the middle of the conflict and others saying to get out as fast as possible. Probably saved at least one person.

At least one police officer should know hir from the streets. At least one other should be knee-jerk suspicious that sie had something to do with the incident.

About a year ago, he met J Ferdinand, the Mayor, while she was doing some political outreach to the homeless. He originally thought this was just the usual cynical politician's exercise, but they get into a lively discussion, and Jeri turned out to be genuinely interested in what life was like on the streets. He was even more surprised when Jeri came back a week later, quietly and without the media entourage, to talk more. They've wound up becoming unlikely but very close friends, meeting once a week in the park to just talk about life and what is going on with them. Jeri first introduced him to the folks at Decameron, which has helped make things a bit better (until today). And over the months, he has begun to have very strong feelings for Jeri, but would never dream of expressing them: someone that powerful and together couldn't possibly be interested in someone as broken as Robert.

Last month, Jonathan spent an evening hanging out with him in the park, talking about his life and what it's all like. He was nervous at first, unwilling to open up, but wound up rather liking him.

See this article by Siderea for ideas and guidance on writing this character.