F.for angsty artwork reasons. How did riker cope with being bullied and his brother dying and being forced to mask as a kid/teen
I had to think about this for a bit-- I haven't written down a ton of specifics. In general terms, it was like he was trying to smother a fire.
Riker had some violent outbursts as a young kid, and had a habit of putting small metal objects in his mouth--screws, washers, that sort of thing-- but after he was diagnosed with autism, his mother came down harder on his behavior. He probably started smoking by mid-late middle school; drank a little in high school but that didn't get Really Bad until college. He was pretty lonely, had one good friend who was a preacher's son (mostly because I like the idea of him getting thoughtful over the Dusty Springfield song).
He also did mechanical repairs on cars, farm equipment, etc. I think he would've thrown himself into tuning things up when he needed to decompress or be away from people. Something I was fairly recently added to the backstory of Riker Venczel, the version of him in The Five Bright Stars, was that his hometown was near a robotics/automaton manufacturing plant, so there were some robots that came in and out of town, more than average for a small town in the Midwest. That probably could hold true for Szarka, too; one incident the two versions share and is briefly referenced in Bad Moon Rising is Riker repairing a 'bot that he found powered down in a barn. That 'bot was named Fitzgerald II and became a sort of fatherly figure for Riker for a while, though he left town before Stephen's death. He came back for a little bit to attend the funeral, but I don't think they reconnected after that.
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