Mike "Mustard" Dijon VM pilot and retro nut - He's just soooo 80s. Nationality: American Age: 16th birthday within a couple weeks of Game Start Gender: Male Height: 5' 2" Weight: 105 lbs A: Money and family: 1: Social status: Worker/middle class (both parents lead small teams at work, his father in the drafting department of a machining company, his mother in the prototyping section of an electronics firm) 2: Parental Status: Both parents alive and well B: Family Standing: 1: Family standing is stable, parents are mildly supportive of his meesing around with high tech equipment. E: Siblings 1 younger brother (Eric, 14, slightly longer hair but otherwise very like Mike. Actually a little more filled out than his brother (bod 5) from being the sports maniac of the family). They get along well enough, and sometimes Mike helps him out with his homework. F: Friends: Most of the VM crowd listed in the book (well, the Good Guys, anyway) can be counted among Mustard's friends, most often Alexei and Arnold. Arnorld and Mustard are especially amused by Alexei and Tamiyka's constant "best enemies" fighting. G: Enemies: As with friends, so with enemies; Ronnie's crew generally heads the list, followed closely by the school bully. Unbeknownst to anyone, one of Mustard's uncles is On The Other Side of the political camp regarding Project Icarus, and may show up in a darker campaign. Whether he's really an enemy or a freind in disguise is, of course, dependent on what exactly Project Icarus really is and is about. H: Romantic Life: Mike has an on again, off again (but mostly on) relationship with Tamiyka Borodinya. They rarely last more than a week together and less that that apart, something that Alexei finds almost as funny as Mike finds his continual arguing with Tamy. Despite this, niether Mike nor Tamy really give anyone else more than a second glance, as far as romantic interest is concerned. I: Physical and personality traits: Hair color: light sand brown, with blond highlights. Hair style: just too long to be a buzz cut, too short to be a page-boy cut. Sometimes friends who want to get on his nerves will call it a "butt cut" because of the way ot tends to fall into very short bangs rather than lying evenly. Eye color: Hazel, fading to bluish on cloudy days. Personality Traits: Generally queit, friendly, and easygoing, even mellow, but gven to the occasional outbreak of humor. Collects Mad Magazine and (formerly) mecha anime - now he spends that money and time on Virtual Mekton, but his very first VM was a repro Macross Dynamite 7 VF-5000, a prebuilt one given to him as a 15th birthday present. Unfortunately, while mondocool in the icon department, it handled like any other premade pig and took forever to change modes, so he got a copy of Blender (a freeware modeling and animation suite for Sun, FreeBSD, and x86 Linux, which may in fact be Open Source - check it out if any of you have an appropriate machine, it looks like it seriously rocks but I don't) and a code compiler and set out to build his own. The m00sey avatar design was inspired by some old netfic he'd found. As of Game Start Time, he's had it basically done and been debugging for about two weeks, and finally has all the wrinkles smoothed out. Consequently, he's riding high, more excited to be playing in his own creation than really worrying about wins/losses ratio or points, though of course he'd prefer to win, like anyone else. His realistically oriented mind also leads the BMBM to be one of the few VM designs that actually have an easy way to reach the cockpit for a virtual human - some don't even have a normal cockpit hatch, only a blow-off escape panel - featuring ladder rungs running up the side of the leg and the abdomen to the clamshell hatch in the chest. He also modeled the Kindjal for Tamy, though she's not yet finfished it as of Game Start, and is still piloting the Mad Cow she won from another player, who was switching to a new design of his own at the time. Consequently, it also features easy access for the theoretical virtual pilot, kneeling and lowering a ramp from the back of the shoulders. (OOC Note: Oh, blast.... now people are going to want stats for the 5K and Mad Cow... and I should draw the Cow, since it's just such a funky design... if you thought a moose head was strange, just you wait! Muahahah!) Thing he values most: Friendship. Mike's always been more of a hardware person, so he considers the friends he has precious. Mustard's most valued posession: An old Powerbook G5, running Mac OS X 3.5 - it belonged to his father, and is barely compatible with modern systems, but suffices to run the BSD versions of Blender, VMSL Builder, and VM@Home. More importanly, it's HIS, and if the only reason he's the only one who really knows how to get it going again when it stops is because everyone else has moved on, that's still fine with Mike. The person Mike values most in the world: A bit over half the time, Tamy. The rest of the time, himself. A quote: "The unfacts, did we have them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude>" (answering a mocking question as to what made the BMBM crash the first time he tried it in the arcade, though it had seemed to work OK in VM@Home... He'd been worned by [insert PC name here - Jaired maybe?] that it was likely, and just getting it to load the first time without raising an immediate error flag was a good accomplishment for a novice coder) Another quote: "I dunno. I think pate is the only good way /to/ have a SuperCanard." (this said after testing the BMBM 350 for the first time, against the vaguely duck-like SuperCanard. He won initiative the second round, and beat all four of his Gettin' Funky attack rolls by no less than four. A 20 hit combo from 10k -40 SP EMW axes is not a pretty sight for the one being hit) Stats and Skills: ATTractiveness: 5 BODy: 4 (indoorsy, but uses exercise equipment and runs) COOL: 6 (too laid back to blow his top most of the time) EMPathy: 6 INTelligence: 5 LUCK: 6 Movement Allowance: 4 (not neccessarily fast, but still, he runs) REFlexes: 5 TECHnical ability: 4 (only just starting to be developed - he's got the potential for an 8 or 9) Reputation With Parents: 5 Money & Finances: 5 EDUcation: 3 VM skills: Piloting: 3 Fighting: 2 Melee: 4 Gunnery: 2 Missiles: 3 Programming: 4 Design: 3 Athletics: 1 (Standard Gym class fare) Awareness: 3 Driving: bicycle 2 Expert: 1980s : 1 (he's an expert on the 80s the way it was represented in movies and TV - not neccessarily historically accurate Expert: electronics 2 (can solder together projects from a book, puzzle out complex circuitry with a bit of help, but not the advanced optical gear) First Aid: 1 Hand to hand: 1 Dodge & Evade: 2 Language : Japanese 2 Persuasion/Fast Talk: 1 Rifle: 2 (has gone hunting with his uncle once on vacation in the US, but liked the target practise beforehand much more than traipsing through the woods) Seduction: 1 Swimming: 1 Write: 1 Mike (Mustard is his screen name, used fairly often by VM playing friends but not by parents or teachers... with the possible exception of the "hipper" teachers like (English Teacher I've Forgotten The Name Of) is pretty much just a regular guy... he has a somewhat on-again-off-again relationship with Tamiyka Borodinya, more often on than off, and several freinds and friendly rivals (plus the not-so-friendly rivals posted by others) at the arcade. He's lucky in that his parents don't mind him playing around with VM designs and the arcade in his spare time, because of his recently discovered interest in the guts of electronics: they figure that the best way to keep his interest in this high-market-value skill is to let him have fun with its products. That isn't to say they let him spend every waking moment outside school glued to the machine; he still has to be sociable once in a while, and help his younger brother Eric with homework sometimes, as well as doing his own. Being the indoorsy sort, he's very rarely got anything approaching a tan, though his daily run for excercise and the self defense class he attends (Emphasis on dodge & Evade, with only enough offense to take opporunity shots - think a first year student of Jackie Chan) keeps Mustard relatively in shape and gives enough time in the sun to put some color in his skin. Most of his his VM fighting style is like certain classic videogames - (Not 80s games, even he admits they were pretty lame) - when he Gets Funky a glowing text string appears floating in space nearby to record how many hits are scored, in the 350. His biggest liability in the game is armor and speed, the Boogie Machine (both versions) is no slouch, but no match for the multimach juggernaughts racing around, either. His strongest suit is melee combat, though it does have some ranged ability as well. He'll always do his best to finish a fight once engaged, but will cut and run if it starts going too badly. A bit-O-history, for the Day at the Beach sidebar duel and the Tax Collectin' Boogie Machine Max: One day, Mike showed up at the VRcade rather depressed and quiet, and played abysmally in a couple of games. Afterwards, his friends in the arcade crowd managed to get him talking about the problem (a double cheeseburger and fries in the attatched dining area served as an adequate bribe, ;?) ) and they learned that the engineering company his father worked at had lost a major contract, and might have to reduce its workforce. Unfortunately, one of Rotten's snaeks overheard this, and reported it to him... Rotten, being the type of person he is, merely saw it as something to use for a psychological advantage, and made sure to join the next game Mustard got into after learning it. Ronnie mentioned he'd heard about Mike's father's problem, and how glad he was he didn't come from a middle class family that had to worry about such things. When this didn't seem to work, he added that he was sure that only the least talented designers would be terminated by any company facing leaner times... then continued with a comment that if Mike was a representative Dijon, that might not be so reassuring. That had the desired effect, the BMBM charging and attacking the DP alone, actually managing to deplete the shield before Ronnie's main gun blew it to bits. Mike stalked out of the Arcade, furious at the insult to himself and his family... he spent the next week and a half coding the Max, his brother Erik only getting him to explain the reasons a day or two before it was complete. When it finally was done, he challenged Ronnie to a duel, the last few moments of which can be found in the sidebar of the "A Day at the Beach" arena, where it took place. Shortly after, his father's company got another contract (ironically, as a subcontractor for one of Ronnie's family's industrial group's projects) and actually had his design team enlarged by two people. Note: Mike's name was Mikado Wasabe when he was at first designed as a Japanese character.