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Bob's a 42-year-old übergeek whose life revolves around gaming. Most of the town considers him the "village idiot", but he, Jake and Finegan have a history of friendship stretching back over the past decade. Although Finegan feels he's outgrown thim, Jake is still fond of Bob and invites him over for movies nights from time to time. Bob's oddities aren't his fault -- he is afflicted with a mild form of autism. His limited ability to function means he still lives in his mother's basement and subsidizes his lifestyle (such as it is) by working at the local pizza restaurant with Jake and Finegan. It's said that if one doesn't evolve, one dies. If one cannot evolve but does not die, does that mean one is the living dead...? Bob’s syndromatic obsession has focused upon fantasy roleplaying games, and secondarily, upon “Conan the Barbarian”. When he’s not working, he’s plugged into his computer playing “World of Warcraft”, which is his latest fixation now that Jake and Finegan don’t come over for Dungeons & Dragons sessions anymore. He collects Conan action figures, comic books and novels (though he doesn’t read much) in addition to other ancillary merchandise related to D&D and WoW. Bob’s parents are divorced, and have been since he was in his early teens and he hasn’t seen his father, William, in almost twenty years. His relationship with his father was a bad one, because his father attributed Bob’s behavior to “coddling” by Bob’s mother. The argument over how to deal with Bob led directly to their divorce. Bob has since channeled his feeling surrounding his lack of a father figure into his obsession with a mythical male role model: Conan the Barbarian. Bob met Jake when he was in his late twenties, and when Jake was 12—when they were about the same emotional maturity level. Bob was really into D&D at the time and they became friends. Bob found someone who could join him in his realm of escapism. Jake later brought Finegan into the gaming circle and Bob now had two friends who would gallivant off into the world of swords & sorcery with him. When Jake and Finegan finished high school, they drifted away from Bob. This was due to a variety of reasons, and was something that Bob never fully understood. He thinks it might be because his friends became bored with the game and they just need to find a different game to play. Now that he’s found “World of Warcraft” he’s desperate to get Jake and Finegan into it with him so he can regain that lost sense of fellowship. In a word, Bob is stagnant. Bob still lives with his mother Barbara, though she’s well into her 70s and he’s in his early 40s. His disability has prevented him from being able to function completely independently and has led to a great deal of stress between him and his mother, who still hasn’t completely acknowledged there’s anything wrong with Bob in the first place. He’s never been officially diagnosed with Asperger’s, but at some level Bob recognizes there’s something “wrong” with him and he puts every penny not spent on gaming merchandise toward a comprehensive life insurance policy so that his mother would be taken care of if anything happened to him. His immediate goals are the same as they’ve been for years: to escape as much as possible into “World of Warcraft” and “Conan”. His longer-term goals are more nebulous—they’re not concrete, they just float in his mind. He wants to make sure his mother’s taken care of because she’s taken care of him for so long. He wants to regain that sense of fellowship he had when Jake and Finegan were coming over to play games with him when they were teenagers. He’s missed having them around because they make the his fantasy worlds so much richer.
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