Name: Dees E-mail: Hornpile [at] gmail [dot] com Preferred Contact: Mosasaurus on plurk; Dees#2550 on discord. Timezone: GMT+1 Current Characters in Victory Road: Armin Arlert (Attack on Titan)
Character Name: Riz Gukgak Series: Dimension 20 - Fantasy High Timeline: "My Green Haven" but instead of ending up in Arborly after going through the door in heaven, he ends up here. Canon Resource Links:Character wikia
Personality:
Let's cut this short. Riz Gukgak is a dweeb. He showed up to his first day of high school wearing a suit and handing out business cards. He's four feet worth of uncool nerd, who never had a friend except for his babysitter until he started high school. His nickname in middle school was Briefcase Kid. At any given moment, he looks like he just walked off the Newsies set and he wears a hat so constantly, that even his best friends hadn't seen him without one until halfway through their sophomore year.
He's weird. He's also much more than that.
Riz is fascinated by solving mysteries and crimes. At any given time, his room has several ongoing case (or conspiracy) boards and even the smallest hint of something hinky going on is enough for Riz to put himself on the case, regardless of whether or not anyone else wants him to be on that case. Finding clues, solving mysteries is his Thing. It's what he does.
In part, Riz's drive to solve mysteries is simply because it is fun to him. Even from a young age, he loved finding lost toys, and his favourite video games are the mystery solving kind. Getting that breakthrough after getting all the clues together, finally seeing the hidden solution is what gets his little goblin heart pumping.
(that and the six cups of cold coffee he drank while working)
"Work is an act of love [...] when you stay up at night with your boards trying to crack the case. You don't do that because you don't care about people. That is you saying 'I love you' to the people who matter to you most."
His desire to solve mysteries isn't just about fun though. It's also how Riz interacts with the world, and more importantly, how he cares for people.
While Riz is plenty outgoing, he's also pretty socially inept. His unusual interests and inability to really notice his own awkwardness kept him from meshing well with other kids to the point his only friend growing up was his babysitter. His ability to solve mysteries and find clues actually gives Riz a way to interact with others in a manner that is on his level so to speak. He might not know how to be cool, but if he can solve issues other people are having, they will at least keep him around.
Furthermore, as the son of a detective mother and a secret agent father, putting hours of working into solving a crime to keep other people safe, even to your own personal detriment, is behaviour that has been modelled to him from a young age, and it is behaviour he idolises in both his parents. Even when it is something that got his father killed when he was nine and kept him from spending much time with his mother because she is always working, it's something he greatly admires both his parents for. They are a family of badass, crime-solving goblins and no matter how much the world looks down on them, they'll find the solution.
Riz knows the world isn't necessarily kind or just. That often, good people end up dying or hurt or kidnapped while bad people live comfortable lives. For him, solving mysteries and crimes is a way to try and help balance that out; to try and help a few more good people survive and put a few more bad people down in the ground. He might not have had many (any) friends growing up, but that was never about Riz not liking people. Riz cares about people a great deal. He'll happily work himself into the ground if that is what it takes to keep people safe. Even if those people will never know about what he did. Solving a mystery or a crime isn't about glory to him. It's about Justice and that is the Gukgak way.
Riz's desire to solve mysteries, to keep people safe and nudge the balance towards Justice where he can shapes his personality in a major way.
In general, Riz is fairly straight-laced. He, more or less, cares about the rules and laws, and is always quick to bring up when something the Bad Kids are attempting to do is illegal. That is, up until the rules get in the way of Solving The Case or protecting people, in which case, the rules are immediately and unscrupulously ignored. This can lead to scenes where Riz will more than happily shoot to kill and then 30 minutes later get on everybody's case for not wearing seatbelts in a car.
(If Chaotic Lawful was an alignment, this is what Riz would be.)
While with the rest of the Bad Kids, Riz is often the voice of, if not reason, then at least (some) focus. It's often him who tries to direct his friends' attention to the matter at hand, and tries to make sure things are followed up on.
But, at the same time, Riz is just a teenage boy too! A teenage boy who has a close group of friends for the first time ever. Which involves getting into a lot of teenage shenanigans like doing snuff and ending up with a shitload of tattoos (his mom is going to kill him), trying to do cool things so the cool jock of the group can think you are also cool (and maybe getting him a BFF necklace because you are Best Friends), and advising your friend to become king of hell because it's pretty rad.
(It was so rad).
"[Riz is] grumbly asleep in a chair in Fabian's room. [...] Just a tiny bouncer, falling asleep."
Riz is also immensely protective of the people he cares about. He is protective of people in general, but when it comes to his close friends and family, Riz can get downright vicious in order to keep them safe. Examples of this can be seen when Riz tortures Biz (by shooting off two of his fingers) in order to get information out of him about Penny's whereabouts, making it very clear to Biz that he'll put the next bullet in his brain if he doesn't start talking. Similarly, when he learns that Kalvaxus is the one who killed his father, Riz not only promises to kill Kalvaxus with his dad's gun, but he also vows to eat the dragon in the same way Kalvaxus ate his father.
Which he then does. Because Riz Gukgak does not make empty promises.
"-- and Riz, you see your dad's grave up on a little hill." "I don't tell anyone."
As an Inquisitive Rogue archetype, Riz excels at investigating his surroundings and others. He's got a keen eye for detail and not easily deceived. Though he is by no means infallible, trying to put something past Riz is not an easy feat. He's often the first to notice when other party members try to break off on their own. Though while he is good at seeing through other people's deception, he's by no means skilled at deceiving himself. He lacks the charm and confidence to easily pull off lies. The best he can do is keeping quiet.
And Riz is very good at keeping quiet.
Riz is, in fact, a very private person. As chattery as he can get about his interests or The Case, when it comes to his own personal feelings or troubles, he clams up. He plays things very close to the vest, rarely letting others in on the things he struggles with. For example, during a visit to the graveyard, Riz doesn't show his friends his father's grave, even though it is easily visible. And it isn't until spring break of their second year, a good year and a half after they've met, that the rest of his friends even get to see a picture of Riz's father. Talking about his feelings makes them Very Real, and frankly, shoving them down into a little box in his head to be ignored, is not only easier, but far more productive. And that is what Riz has to be, right?
"Why do you think your friends keep you around, Riz Gukgak?"
As mentioned, Riz is a workaholic. There is always some mystery to solve, some crime to work on. As a result, he rarely sleeps and drinks more coffee than is healthy. Though it is joked about, one thing Riz had to face in the Nightmare Forest, a place where everybody has to face their worst fears, is taking a nap. It's something so simple and easy for other people, but to Riz, time spent asleep is time he can't spend solving a case. And if he isn't solving a case, then who is keeping those people safe?
And, perhaps more importantly, if he isn't solving a case, why would anyone keep him around?
One of Riz's greatest fear is the idea that people keep him around because he is useful and that if he stops being useful that will also stop. He knows he is socially awkward and nobody's first choice of a friend. He knows he finally ended up with a group of friends because of a stroke of luck; if they hadn't been in detention together, would the rest of the Bad Kids ever really have looked at him? If it wasn't for the clues he can find, would they ever keep him around?
He very much fears the answer to this, which is why he throws himself into his work.
Another thing that ties into this is Riz's sexuality. Or lack thereof. Or well, he really doesn't know what the hell is going on with that whole department, but it is a fact that while all of his friends are super horny and hooking up, Riz is... not. And he isn't sure if he ever wants to. Right now, it's just another thing that sets him apart from other teens (to the point, he came up with a fake roemance romance partner 'Baron from the Baronies' just to avoid any questions about the subject) and it is something he fears will just lead everybody around him to find someone they love more and better than awkward weird him and that they will all end up leaving him.
It is a fear he had to face in the Nightmare Forest and while it is a fear he has logical arguments against (Teen romances don't last and his friends have already shown they care about him for more than just his riddle-solving abilities), emotionally, it's still something that is hard for Riz to deal with.
(Which, again, is why it is better to bury yourself in work and work yourself to the edge of exhaustion because you don't have to think about feelings and insecurities while you are doing that!)
Pokémon Information Affiliation: Trainer Starter: Yungoos Password: Atomic Fireball
[To say Riz is completely freaked out by this situation is putting it mildly. There is being freaked out and there is what he is experiencing now after waking up on the wrong plane, in the wrong kind of body, with the wrong sort of woman calling herself his mom (this woman was nowhere near badass enough to be Sklonda Gukgak) and he's being followed by some weird... mongoose... ferret... slinky rat?? thing (Riz is sure he's rolling all ones on his Nature checks cause he cannot tell what the fuck that thing is).
So Riz did the only thing sensible -- he had run into the forest, ran long enough for his legs to feel like they were going to fall off, and then he had scrambled up a suitably thick tree, stealthing himself away in the canopy so he could take proper inventory of his situation.
The last thing he remembers is heaven; it's meeting his father (and seriously, he had always known his dad had been a badass, but an interplanar, undercover secret agent for Heaven? That was just Fucking Badass, capitals and all) and getting to talk to him for the first time in years, actually, talk to him and not just at his gravestone. He remembers new breakthroughs, putting together more clues to Kalina's existence with the information his father had and actually helping Heaven advance their case and becoming an actual honest-to-all-the-gods Heavenly consultant himself. He remembers-- actually, no, that had been kind of a really emotional and embarrassing conversation that he's going to mentally file away in the 'do not touch for now' box. Mysteries first, awkward breakdowns about his sexuality (lack thereof?) later. Much later. Perhaps never!
He remembers walking through the door, the one that was supposed to take him back to Arborly but instead had taken him here.
Here, where there was no sign of his friends, or the nightmare forest, or his weapons. Here, where there wasn't even a sign of his normal body -- Riz still abhors looking into mirrors, but a quick glance in one he found in the backpack the weird woman had shoved into his arms confirms what the stubby pink hands had already implied: somehow he was human now, not a single sign of his normal Goblin heritage remaining. Normally green skin was now a pale, splotchy pink. His teeth were all flat and dull, not a single fang remaining. His nails were equally dull, small and pale half-moon ovals against his now pink hands. They were his hands though. He wasn't somehow possessing some human body. This was his body, scars and ill-advised tattoos and everything just... human and wrong.
Had that been the game plan all along? Had Kalina somehow gotten involved and shunted him off somewhere far from his friends, someplace where he couldn't help them with their quest? Could she do that?]
xxx
[Despite the cool weather, Riz is definitely sweating buckets, his finger hovering over the post button for the network. He's been trying to glean as much information as he can from that, but most of his questions are still unanswered. Which means it's time to try a more direct form of information gathering.
Which, unfortunately, is not his thing at all. He's the rogue! He does the sneaky stuff. Or the research stuff. Not the chat and gather intel part. Fig would normally be the one handling these kind of things. She's got that crazy charm and a deception high enough that she could probably sell sand in a desert.
Riz chews on his lip with his weird new flat teeth as he scans over the message he drafted one more time. It... sounds okay to him, but he knows from experience that the things that sound good to him don't always (actually, kind of almost never) sound good to other people. But he's gotta try, right? He really needs to find a way out of this weird plane as soon as possible.
He hits the post button and moments later a Anonymous message pops up on the network.]
Hi!! My name is Penelope and like, wow, I was totally not supposed to be here at all! I've got some like, *crazy* important stuff going on back home, so I can't stay and hang. Can someone be like super sweet and tell me how to get off this plane? I'm like really cute so you should totally help me which would be so rad.
PS. If anyone here knows anything about Crab Kings or Shrimp Parties they should definitely let me know.
[Riz has been scanning the contact list and network for any sign of the other Bad Kids, but he hasn't spotted a thing. Which is a good thing, probably. They need to be back in Arborly to deal with the Nightmare King. But just in case there is something he missed or they are laying low, that PS should catch their attention without being obvious to anyone else.
Riz Gukgak | Fantasy High
E-mail: Hornpile [at] gmail [dot] com
Preferred Contact: Mosasaurus on plurk; Dees#2550 on discord.
Timezone: GMT+1
Current Characters in Victory Road: Armin Arlert (Attack on Titan)
Character
Name: Riz Gukgak
Series: Dimension 20 - Fantasy High
Timeline: "My Green Haven" but instead of ending up in Arborly after going through the door in heaven, he ends up here.
Canon Resource Links: Character wikia
Personality:
Let's cut this short. Riz Gukgak is a dweeb. He showed up to his first day of high school wearing a suit and handing out business cards. He's four feet worth of uncool nerd, who never had a friend except for his babysitter until he started high school. His nickname in middle school was Briefcase Kid. At any given moment, he looks like he just walked off the Newsies set and he wears a hat so constantly, that even his best friends hadn't seen him without one until halfway through their sophomore year.
He's weird. He's also much more than that.
Riz is fascinated by solving mysteries and crimes. At any given time, his room has several ongoing case (or conspiracy) boards and even the smallest hint of something hinky going on is enough for Riz to put himself on the case, regardless of whether or not anyone else wants him to be on that case. Finding clues, solving mysteries is his Thing. It's what he does.
In part, Riz's drive to solve mysteries is simply because it is fun to him. Even from a young age, he loved finding lost toys, and his favourite video games are the mystery solving kind. Getting that breakthrough after getting all the clues together, finally seeing the hidden solution is what gets his little goblin heart pumping.
(that and the six cups of cold coffee he drank while working)
"Work is an act of love [...] when you stay up at night with your boards trying to crack the case.
You don't do that because you don't care about people. That is you saying 'I love you' to the people who matter to you most."
His desire to solve mysteries isn't just about fun though. It's also how Riz interacts with the world, and more importantly, how he cares for people.
While Riz is plenty outgoing, he's also pretty socially inept. His unusual interests and inability to really notice his own awkwardness kept him from meshing well with other kids to the point his only friend growing up was his babysitter. His ability to solve mysteries and find clues actually gives Riz a way to interact with others in a manner that is on his level so to speak. He might not know how to be cool, but if he can solve issues other people are having, they will at least keep him around.
Furthermore, as the son of a detective mother and a secret agent father, putting hours of working into solving a crime to keep other people safe, even to your own personal detriment, is behaviour that has been modelled to him from a young age, and it is behaviour he idolises in both his parents. Even when it is something that got his father killed when he was nine and kept him from spending much time with his mother because she is always working, it's something he greatly admires both his parents for. They are a family of badass, crime-solving goblins and no matter how much the world looks down on them, they'll find the solution.
Riz knows the world isn't necessarily kind or just. That often, good people end up dying or hurt or kidnapped while bad people live comfortable lives. For him, solving mysteries and crimes is a way to try and help balance that out; to try and help a few more good people survive and put a few more bad people down in the ground. He might not have had many (any) friends growing up, but that was never about Riz not liking people. Riz cares about people a great deal. He'll happily work himself into the ground if that is what it takes to keep people safe. Even if those people will never know about what he did. Solving a mystery or a crime isn't about glory to him. It's about Justice and that is the Gukgak way.
Riz's desire to solve mysteries, to keep people safe and nudge the balance towards Justice where he can shapes his personality in a major way.
In general, Riz is fairly straight-laced. He, more or less, cares about the rules and laws, and is always quick to bring up when something the Bad Kids are attempting to do is illegal. That is, up until the rules get in the way of Solving The Case or protecting people, in which case, the rules are immediately and unscrupulously ignored. This can lead to scenes where Riz will more than happily shoot to kill and then 30 minutes later get on everybody's case for not wearing seatbelts in a car.
(If Chaotic Lawful was an alignment, this is what Riz would be.)
While with the rest of the Bad Kids, Riz is often the voice of, if not reason, then at least (some) focus. It's often him who tries to direct his friends' attention to the matter at hand, and tries to make sure things are followed up on.
But, at the same time, Riz is just a teenage boy too! A teenage boy who has a close group of friends for the first time ever. Which involves getting into a lot of teenage shenanigans like doing snuff and ending up with a shitload of tattoos (his mom is going to kill him), trying to do cool things so the cool jock of the group can think you are also cool (and maybe getting him a BFF necklace because you are Best Friends), and advising your friend to become king of hell because it's pretty rad.
(It was so rad).
"[Riz is] grumbly asleep in a chair in Fabian's room. [...] Just a tiny bouncer, falling asleep."
Riz is also immensely protective of the people he cares about. He is protective of people in general, but when it comes to his close friends and family, Riz can get downright vicious in order to keep them safe. Examples of this can be seen when Riz tortures Biz (by shooting off two of his fingers) in order to get information out of him about Penny's whereabouts, making it very clear to Biz that he'll put the next bullet in his brain if he doesn't start talking. Similarly, when he learns that Kalvaxus is the one who killed his father, Riz not only promises to kill Kalvaxus with his dad's gun, but he also vows to eat the dragon in the same way Kalvaxus ate his father.Which he then does. Because Riz Gukgak does not make empty promises.
"-- and Riz, you see your dad's grave up on a little hill." "I don't tell anyone."
As an Inquisitive Rogue archetype, Riz excels at investigating his surroundings and others. He's got a keen eye for detail and not easily deceived. Though he is by no means infallible, trying to put something past Riz is not an easy feat. He's often the first to notice when other party members try to break off on their own. Though while he is good at seeing through other people's deception, he's by no means skilled at deceiving himself. He lacks the charm and confidence to easily pull off lies. The best he can do is keeping quiet.
And Riz is very good at keeping quiet.
Riz is, in fact, a very private person. As chattery as he can get about his interests or The Case, when it comes to his own personal feelings or troubles, he clams up. He plays things very close to the vest, rarely letting others in on the things he struggles with. For example, during a visit to the graveyard, Riz doesn't show his friends his father's grave, even though it is easily visible. And it isn't until spring break of their second year, a good year and a half after they've met, that the rest of his friends even get to see a picture of Riz's father. Talking about his feelings makes them Very Real, and frankly, shoving them down into a little box in his head to be ignored, is not only easier, but far more productive. And that is what Riz has to be, right?
"Why do you think your friends keep you around, Riz Gukgak?"
As mentioned, Riz is a workaholic. There is always some mystery to solve, some crime to work on. As a result, he rarely sleeps and drinks more coffee than is healthy. Though it is joked about, one thing Riz had to face in the Nightmare Forest, a place where everybody has to face their worst fears, is taking a nap. It's something so simple and easy for other people, but to Riz, time spent asleep is time he can't spend solving a case. And if he isn't solving a case, then who is keeping those people safe?
And, perhaps more importantly, if he isn't solving a case, why would anyone keep him around?
One of Riz's greatest fear is the idea that people keep him around because he is useful and that if he stops being useful that will also stop. He knows he is socially awkward and nobody's first choice of a friend. He knows he finally ended up with a group of friends because of a stroke of luck; if they hadn't been in detention together, would the rest of the Bad Kids ever really have looked at him? If it wasn't for the clues he can find, would they ever keep him around?
He very much fears the answer to this, which is why he throws himself into his work.
Another thing that ties into this is Riz's sexuality. Or lack thereof. Or well, he really doesn't know what the hell is going on with that whole department, but it is a fact that while all of his friends are super horny and hooking up, Riz is... not. And he isn't sure if he ever wants to. Right now, it's just another thing that sets him apart from other teens (to the point, he came up with a fake
roemanceromance partner 'Baron from the Baronies' just to avoid any questions about the subject) and it is something he fears will just lead everybody around him to find someone they love more and better than awkward weird him and that they will all end up leaving him.It is a fear he had to face in the Nightmare Forest and while it is a fear he has logical arguments against (Teen romances don't last and his friends have already shown they care about him for more than just his riddle-solving abilities), emotionally, it's still something that is hard for Riz to deal with.
(Which, again, is why it is better to bury yourself in work and work yourself to the edge of exhaustion because you don't have to think about feelings and insecurities while you are doing that!)
Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Yungoos
Password: Atomic Fireball
Samples
RP Sample: Riz on the TDM
Victory Road Sample:
[To say Riz is completely freaked out by this situation is putting it mildly. There is being freaked out and there is what he is experiencing now after waking up on the wrong plane, in the wrong kind of body, with the wrong sort of woman calling herself his mom (this woman was nowhere near badass enough to be Sklonda Gukgak) and he's being followed by some weird... mongoose... ferret... slinky rat?? thing (Riz is sure he's rolling all ones on his Nature checks cause he cannot tell what the fuck that thing is).
So Riz did the only thing sensible -- he had run into the forest, ran long enough for his legs to feel like they were going to fall off, and then he had scrambled up a suitably thick tree, stealthing himself away in the canopy so he could take proper inventory of his situation.
The last thing he remembers is heaven; it's meeting his father (and seriously, he had always known his dad had been a badass, but an interplanar, undercover secret agent for Heaven? That was just Fucking Badass, capitals and all) and getting to talk to him for the first time in years, actually, talk to him and not just at his gravestone. He remembers new breakthroughs, putting together more clues to Kalina's existence with the information his father had and actually helping Heaven advance their case and becoming an actual honest-to-all-the-gods Heavenly consultant himself. He remembers-- actually, no, that had been kind of a really emotional and embarrassing conversation that he's going to mentally file away in the 'do not touch for now' box. Mysteries first, awkward breakdowns about his sexuality (lack thereof?) later. Much later. Perhaps never!
He remembers walking through the door, the one that was supposed to take him back to Arborly but instead had taken him here.
Here, where there was no sign of his friends, or the nightmare forest, or his weapons. Here, where there wasn't even a sign of his normal body -- Riz still abhors looking into mirrors, but a quick glance in one he found in the backpack the weird woman had shoved into his arms confirms what the stubby pink hands had already implied: somehow he was human now, not a single sign of his normal Goblin heritage remaining. Normally green skin was now a pale, splotchy pink. His teeth were all flat and dull, not a single fang remaining. His nails were equally dull, small and pale half-moon ovals against his now pink hands. They were his hands though. He wasn't somehow possessing some human body. This was his body, scars and ill-advised tattoos and everything just... human and wrong.
Had that been the game plan all along? Had Kalina somehow gotten involved and shunted him off somewhere far from his friends, someplace where he couldn't help them with their quest? Could she do that?]
[Despite the cool weather, Riz is definitely sweating buckets, his finger hovering over the post button for the network. He's been trying to glean as much information as he can from that, but most of his questions are still unanswered. Which means it's time to try a more direct form of information gathering.
Which, unfortunately, is not his thing at all. He's the rogue! He does the sneaky stuff. Or the research stuff. Not the chat and gather intel part. Fig would normally be the one handling these kind of things. She's got that crazy charm and a deception high enough that she could probably sell sand in a desert.
Riz chews on his lip with his weird new flat teeth as he scans over the message he drafted one more time. It... sounds okay to him, but he knows from experience that the things that sound good to him don't always (actually, kind of almost never) sound good to other people. But he's gotta try, right? He really needs to find a way out of this weird plane as soon as possible.
He hits the post button and moments later a Anonymous message pops up on the network.]
Hi!!
My name is Penelope and like, wow, I was totally not supposed to be here at all!
I've got some like, *crazy* important stuff going on back home, so I can't stay and hang.
Can someone be like super sweet and tell me how to get off this plane?
I'm like really cute so you should totally help me which would be so rad.
PS. If anyone here knows anything about Crab Kings or Shrimp Parties they should definitely let me know.
[Riz has been scanning the contact list and network for any sign of the other Bad Kids, but he hasn't spotted a thing. Which is a good thing, probably. They need to be back in Arborly to deal with the Nightmare King. But just in case there is something he missed or they are laying low, that PS should catch their attention without being obvious to anyone else.
Or. Well. That's what he hopes, at least.]