Viron University

Viron University is a major university campus located in Viron, near the city of Dirbine / Evansville in The Gerosha Chronicles of Dozerfleet Comics. It is the Gerosha universe equivalent to the University of Southern Indiana. It featured in both the 2006 and 2007 versions of Ciem and Ciem 2, as the college that Candi attended.

Gerosha Prime - Comprehensive Gerosha history
See also: Ciem in various media, Ciem, Ciem: Vigilante Centipede, Ciem 2, Ciem: Nuclear Crisis

Notable history of Viron University follows some time shortly before the arrival of Candi on campus. Denny Levens moved to the area. Candi later moved to the area. She started attending Viron Community Church, where Wilbur Brocklyn was the minister. Candi would later marry Denny and conceive Angie. Their time together was short, as Musaran went on a murder spree while Candi was too pregnant to stop him. Later, Duke Arfaas attempted to recruit all of the campus to his Hebbleskin Gang coup to create an enclave nation of "Netheel," and eventually take over the world. He had succeeded at taking over Dirbine and its police force, headed by the corrupt police chief Merle Hourvitz. After Angie's death, Candi returned to the area as Ciem and orchestrated a scheme to first rid the area of the dreaded Kerpher Gang and later, to overthrow Arfaas. Much of the area surrounding the campus was either destroyed or heavily damaged as the greater Dirbine/Evansville area was thrown into civil war between American patriots and Arfaas loyalists. The campus was thrown into turmoil again later on, when downtown Dirbine / Evansville came under attack from the Mik-Non terrorist group and Captain Aardwulf.

Cataclysmic Gerosha
See also: Sodality

The area near Perry Township once upon a time looked like a place Candi might be willing to move. She very well could have - if the region hadn't been destroyed by the Ameristani regime under orders from Halal Affadidah. Since then, Candi had to enroll at the University of Houston to get what she wanted out of life. Getting to Texas, however, proved a perilous journey in and of itself. Little did she know what adventures awaited her after her arrival.

Notable students

 * Candi Levens (Earth-G4, G5, and G6)
 * Claire Rauscher (G5 only)
 * Laurie Pegol (G5 and G6)
 * Kathy Rittney (G5 only)
 * Stella Oggles (G5 only)
 * Dhalia Lorrice (G5 only)

Academics
Coincidentally, the real-life USI campus has a forensic anthropology major in its college of liberal arts. Candi's major is described generically as "forensic investigation," both in Ciem and in materials for Vigilante Centipede. All other majors should be assumed to be like USI's unless otherwise noted.

Student life
Very little is explored of actual student life for the average student, but both Ciem and Ciem: Vigilante Centipede give insights into Viron culture and how it affects the student body. Viron students tend to be very work-obsessed, sex-obsessed, and suffer very high rates of depression. Drug use is low, but sexual blackmail is a frequent problem - as is rape. Fear of the Hebbleskin Gang drives the student body, as does fear of organized crime in general. Students have their option of four different cafeterias to eat at. They are all required to be registered to a dorm room their first year, but wealthy students may opt to buy or rent a house in town and pay double-rent. Upon becoming sophomores, students have the option to not have a dorm assignment any longer.

Students seeking recreation can watch a football or basketball game, get involved in the golf program, head downtown to the Auld Time Buddies Bar, hang out at the Hazy Eighties Bowling Alley, or go to the skating rink. Actual jobs are scarce in Classic Gerosha Viron. Comprehensive Gerosha Viron has the same availability as real-life Perry Township.

Latin / Greek life
Very little about the college's Greek life is explored, but there is a Latin-named fraternity on campus dubbed "Multis Canes Arborum." Arguably, the correct Latin expression for "The Many Dogs of Many Trees" should be et canes multi multis arboribus. But the incorrect Latin proved more convenient. The frat was named after a joke, as the Dozerfleet founder and his brother used to laugh about the subject matter in the latter's Latin classes in high school. Further driving home the point, the fictional fraternity didn't spell their own name correctly on their sign. They misspelled it "Multis Canis Arborem."

Athletics
Sports at Viron consist of football, pom / cheer squad, golf, and basketball. The local team is referred to as the Camelorem, or the "of many camels." The name is often highly questioned by students. However, this was chosen due to a number of factors. The first was the fact that the Dozerfleet founder at that time in 2007 didn't know about USI's Screaming Eagles. Second, getting an eagle mascot in The Sims 2 would have proven difficult. Third, the cheerleader outfits worn for chapter 16 would have had to have been repainted, taking that much extra time, just to replace the llama image with something else. Otherwise, Camelorem was a way to both tie it in with the Multis Canis Arborem joke and keep a dromedary theme without calling them the llamas; as a way of creating some segregation between story and medium.

Campus
Exact layouts to the campus are often considered flexible. The Comprehensive Gerosha layout was to follow a pattern of "Like University of Southern Indiana unless otherwise noted." However, Classic Gerosha's map was as fluid as the plot needed it to be. Various landmarks on the campus were designed to be parodies of the campus of Ferris State University, the Dozerfleet founder's alma mater. The clock tower scene, for example, was meant to replicate the area around Ferris' clock tower as much as possible. Even the background buildings were meant to vaguely resemble the FLITE library and old Rankin Center, which was standing at the time the Dozerfleet founder attended school there. The "Scarr Building," for example, was a crude re-creation of the Starr Building. Even the scene where Candi is about to enter the theater building area by hallway was modeled after the hallway in which Starr connects to the Williams Auditorium.

Despair and Classic Geroshas
Viron University was first developed as a concept in late 2005, to explain where Candi's alma mater would be located. Farrenville Community College was thought up as Miriam's school, where the girls separately went. This was later modified so that Miriam never actually made it to Farrenville Community before finding herself working in Alaska. The university was briefly explored as a background feature in the Despair Gerosha version of Ciem, though Candi was rarely seen engaging in anything academic. Classic Gerosha partially fixed that, showing Candi in a sociology class briefly. This class was modeled after the Dozerfleet founder's spring 2007 Sociology 121 class, in which Nick Budamir was the guest teacher. Budamir was a regular of the faculty at Muskegon Community College. He was portrayed in The Sims 2 as "Niles Beldon." Various other on-campus and slightly-off-campus buildings factored into the plot on an as-needed basis, leading to some confusion as to the exact geographic composition of Viron.

Comprehensive Gerosha
Comprehensive Gerosha sought to correct these issues by using Google Maps rather than any particular Sims game to define clear geography points. Scenes were studied from Google, then approximately re-created in the game for concept art purposes for Ciem: Vigilante Centipede. The front cover art for Ciem: Nuclear Crisis wanted to use a scene from downtown Evansville, likewise. However, there was no means to travel there nor secure rights to a photo from that area. Therefore, downtown Grand Ledge served as a geography double via careful angle selection in July of 2012.

Cataclysmic Gerosha
Little is said of Viron University in Cataclysmic Gerosha, as the Sodality series timeline assumes that most of southern Indiana was completely destroyed by the Ameristani regime under orders from Halal Affadidah. A Boko Haram attitude of intense and even boiling hatred for western education would have played a major role. One proposed level for the proposed game Centipede + 49 suggests that Ferris State was spared - only to be re-purposed as a sort of rotting fortress for regime forces to hide a 1-gigaton nuclear bomb inside a dorm room.