Name: “Maddog” Rietman
Gender: Male
Age: 71
Nationality: Imperial/Athenian
Zoid: None
AIM: BlackOrpheusSSDD

Personality:“Maddog” is, as his name suggests, a bit on the crazy side. He’s old and he’s seen a lot of things, some of which have shaken him to his core, and that’s why he’s the way he is. Mostly. A good portion of his eccentricity is also his age showing through, and the first vestiges of senility creeping up on him. He’s generally a fairly kindly person, though people find him to be overly cheerful and daunting at first, but they get used to it. He’s rather forgetful, having a hard time remembering a lot of things, but he is a psychological master, knowing how to scare people very well.

Rietman, though old, is still a male and he has an eye for younger women, which many find to be quite lewd and crass, but he only ever looks. The memory of his dead wife still lingers in him and although he appreciates the female form he feels pangs of remorse and shame when he does. Rietman loved his wife dearly and visits her often, leaving fresh flowers by her grave every week and spending a lot of time in a nearby park. If asked about his wife, you just know Rietman will start on one of the long ‘oldfella’ spiels that no one but that person and any other older people in the vicinity might care about.

Having children who don’t seem to acknowledge his existence and a stubborn streak a mile wide, Rietman generally lives alone in his small cottage, living a solitary life where he plays cards, fills in crosswords and occasionally plays chess against those simple AI programs that have nothing better to do. His life is in general dreary and unimportant, lonely and hollow, so he takes his own eccentric pleasure in being part of the Crash test Dummies.

Background:
Rietman was born in the year NC21, the bastard child of an Imperial soldier and a Trillistan woman, who met under combat circumstances during the occupation of the Eastern Continent. The soldier, an ace Redler pilot, was shot down above a Trillistan village and rescued by a young Trillistan woman. She helped him to her house and, despite the risk of corporal punishment for assisting an enemy soldier, nursed him back to health. Illicit relationships blossomed, an affair took place and blam! Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a bouncing baby boy.

During the occupation of the Eastern Continent, many villages were ravaged, including Reitman’s own. The survivors were rounded up and became prisoners of war, sent to an internment camp. The camp itself was within the standards laid down by old war meetings and treatises and the like, but the transport there was not, many being obsolete and ramshackle vehicles repossessed from the Trillistani themselves. Rietman’s mother was being transported in such a vehicle when an axle snapped and the vehicle careened into a lake, drowning the PoWs locked in the back. The soldiers in the driver’s station survived and would later play an important part in Rietman’s life.

However, for now he was a war orphan, and was sent to a war orphanage at the age of three. It was a good enough place to meet the parameters of human rights laws, but nothing special. This is when a coincidence of plot-driven proportions took place, for it turned out that one of the men working at the war orphanage was the former soldier who was Rietman’s father. He’d become a humanitarian aid volunteer following the love affair with the Trillistan woman, and he recognized the name of the woman from the various lists provided by the military. This man took Rietman under his wing and began to raise him as best he could while still serving at the war orphanage, where he planned to spend as much time as the war stretched on for.

Rietman grew up in the orphanage and was therefore not treated to anything extraordinary, learning humility and acceptance but also developing a tough streak of stubbornness that insisted he would have a better life elsewhere. Still, he was educated, fed, and kept healthy. He enjoyed writing letters to people who often wrote to the children in the orphanage, but he liked it even more when he received letters from his grandparents, from his father’s side. He continued to grow and learnt many good values, but also toughened up quickly, as you do when you live a rugged life as he did.

In NC34, the sweeping extermination of the Trillistani people prompted the humanitarian aid teams to register various refugee camps for migrant status and legal asylum in Imperial and Republic land. The children of Reitman’s orphanage were sent to live in New Helic City under safe asylum laws and so he and his father went their separate ways. From age thirteen until twenty one, Rietman lived a normal teenage life, as best he could, though he was always active in the humanitarian aid sector. When he was twenty one though, Rietman’s life was changed when he was paid out a rather hefty reparation by the Imperial military as a discreet apology for the death of his mother and the general extermination of the Trillistani.

Fast forward, Reitman attended college, was awarded a Bachelor of Humanitarian Sciences, went on to be a social worker, eventually becoming a psychologist trained to deal with migrants and refugees. As a public servant, Rietman was paid very well and managed to live a comfortable life. He married at the age of thirty five, becoming wed to a beautiful young woman called Eva. They were deeply in love and had two children, a son and a daughter. Life continued on, they all grew older. A row erupted in the family when his son informed them all he’d been a closet homosexual since sixteen. Rietman took a tough stance on this, and family relations became strained until, when his son was twenty three and he sixty, they ceased to communicate. His daughter left for college, became a successful business woman and generally became too busy to bother with her family.

Faced with retirement and a greatly reduced family size, Rietman and Eva purchased a nice cottage in the countryside a few hours drive from Athens. Rietman enrolled in the AIZDAT college mature-age courses to learn how to become a testing subject, eager to continue pulling in some money now they were retired, and eager to experience some adrenaline to spice up his life. He graduated and became a tester at the age of 67, but a year later something happened that no one predicted. His beloved wife, Eva, died of a heart attack and he was overcome with sadness. For a while he had trouble coping, developing eccentricities and flights of fancy to escape reality, but his daughter, in order to alleviate her guilt at not helping him through his hard time, sent him to a top-quality retirement home and found him some excellent psychiatrists and psychologists to help his issues.

After a year at Holy Oakes Retirement Home, Rietman decided that though he was now coping well, his recovery process for the mourning would be faster if he was near his wife’s grave, which is in a cemetary a few kilometres from the cottage they still owned. So he moved back there and resumed his AIZDAT work, in order to maintain his lifestyle as best he could without Eva. Through work, he met a few others who were interested in actually battling, and the idea thrilled him, so with his money he joined the team and plans to purchase a top quality Zoid to assist the rest of his team.

Physical Description:
Rietman is fairly small, but isn’t frail being slightly overweight in fact. He has faint wisps of white hair around his scalp, but his crown is bare and shiny. Such is the curse of old age. His face is wrinkled and his nose is ruddy from broken capillaries and the like. He has a droopy moustache and a neat beard adorns the lower half of his face. His eyes are watery and pale brown, while he has false teeth that he likes to click in and out with his tongue. Rietman wears a pale brown or blue cardigan over a neatly-maintained button-up cotton shirt, and comfortable corduroy slacks. He has soft brown leather loafers with orthopaedic soles and a sparkling golden analogue watch adorns one liver-spotted wrist.

Well, I'd hate to see what a rough-and-tumble melee would do to this thing, but approved. 54k.