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HISTORY: Reno's mother was a whore.
Now, you see, Wall Market had escorts, Wall Market had prostitutes, and then Wall Market had whores. Reno's mother fell squarely in the last category. She was a fuck-me-'til-I'm-sloppy, always high out of her mind, giggly, tousled, lipstick-smeared whore. Reno remembered not being able to get to the cot he called a bed without tripping over half a dozen reeking, empty beer and whiskey bottles, and those were on the good days. Bad ones had him picking his way through used condoms, which his mother told him on more than one occasion she used only as a preventative measure against getting landed with another one of him.
Thing was, Reno never thought of his mother as a bad mother. She was far from a good one, but she didn't beat him, there was usually some kind of food in the pantry, and as Reno was growing up she gave hell to any of the men she brought home who wanted a little something extra from the boy. Then again, a guy should be able to say better things about his childhood than having avoided molestation from his mother's johns.
Irregardless of of his view of his mother, the fact remained that life was a senseless series of events for Reno. During the day he went out into the slums and rifled through garbage for things worth keeping, maybe loitered a bit in the park. Then at night he'd go home, make sure his mother was still breathing, and fall to sleep listening to the sounds of the slums, the noises people made as they did what they had to survive. Sometimes he talked to the girls whose mothers worked for the Don, and it opened his eyes to how much worse he could really have it. Still, the future was dim for him, blotted out by the towering iron plates above.
Then came the itch. It started as a vague discomfort in his fingertips, in that place just behind the knee and somewhere between his third and fourth ribs. He wanted to get out of here. The older he grew, the worse that itch became. First he started scaling the towering heaps of garbage and metal scraps, trying to climb right into the sky. When that stopped being enough, he started getting into fights with other boys. When that stopped being enough, he started picking fights with grown men, grinning wolfishly as they beat him bloody.
Day by day, his want became a need. He needed to get the hell out of the slums or he'd die here, and he knew he'd wind up dying sooner rather than later. So he came up with a plan, because that's what people who faced certain death did. In the slums, the only dream of getting out that was even remotely viable was to dream of working for Shinra. There was barely a soul down there who didn't have some pipe dream of either marrying rich or landing a job with them and getting out of their dingy, dismal underworld for good. Reno knew he couldn't be like them or he'd still be down here when his bones turned to dust.
So he came up with a slightly different approach.
He didn't intend to work for any office or research facility. He didn't even intend to enlist in their military. He wanted more than that, because that itch had grown near insatiable by the time he was fifteen. He'd heard things about the Turks, about those seldom seen men in suits who shadowed the President and mopped up all of the company's messes. Reno had been born to a world of broken glass and twisted metal, had waded through puddles of every kind of fluid a body could excrete in life and in death. He'd never been afraid of getting his hands dirty.
He was going to make Shinra see him.
That meant, of course, that he did what he did best. He made trouble.
He found a company sponsored event, some kind of reception following a parade, and slipped through security like the weasel he was. He figured by the end of the day, he'd either be shot to death or offered a job. Either would cure his itch.
As luck would have it, someone spotted the raw talent and inextinguishable drive in the boy and, in fact, did not shoot him, and from then on Reno was known as a Turk.
Because Shinra was the first and only thing to ever give Reno's life purpose, despite all appearances he was fiercely loyal to the company. If they issued him an order, he carried it out without reservation or question. The company's dress code and formal policies never quite caught up to him, but his heart was in it where it counted at least.
PERSONALITY: Reno's the first one who will tell you that his life's been kinda shitty. Mom was a half gil whore, meaning you couldn't only fuck her once. You had to do her twice just to pay her. Grew up dirt poor, always two bites from being full and ten degrees from being warm. At the same time, he doesn't hold himself as a victim of his past. His life's his fucking life. That's all it is. It made him into who he is, and he happens to like who he's become. For all the mess his mom was, she managed to keep him alive until he was old enough to fend for himself, and he can't exactly complain for the face she gave him so here they are.
Besides that, he feels as though he's gotten out of the shadow of his past by now. Midgar's plates no longer tower above him. He's a Turk first and a slum brat second. For him, there really isn't any 'off the clock'. He's always a Turk, and he's always on the job. And he's good at it too, despite the overwhelming evidence on the contrary. His work ethic gets a bit questionable in that he'll drink and, uh, make merry while on active duty, and his uniform hasn't seen the flat side of an iron in the last two decades. He's rude to his superiors and flippant to his peers.
However, none of that changes the fact that he's extremely competent at what he does, and he's the Turk with the fewest reservations. The Turks are held to a certain standard of commitment to the company, but Reno takes that and goes above and beyond. He's the one who's willing to, in no uncertain terms, lie, steal, burn, kill, and fuck anything and everything it takes to get his job done. And he'll do it for you with a smile too. He doesn't feel much remorse for what he does either, but it's not for a lack of empathy. He just views the world as a place where you have to be willing to get a little blood under your nails to make it, and he accepts that others would easily do the same to him. And he wouldn't begrudge them for it either.
That's just life.
Work aside, Reno's a pretty cheerful guy. He carries with him a sense of slightly cynical optimism, because he's a thoroughly disillusioned young man who still manages to have very high hopes for his life. He's the kind of guy who would grin at you and tell you that every day of his life is the best day of his life, because like hell it could get any worse. His sense of humor goes between dry and childish, and his relative maturity ranges wildly depending on what kind of mood you find him in.