Fritz Vaine

Fritz Vaine was born in Cologne, Germany in 1977. Always unusually bright, at the age of 18 he moved to America to study biology, where he excelled. He eventually became a geneticist, working on a top secret project for a major corporation. However, it was at this point where his life took a turn for the worse. His theoretically revolutionary experiments did not pan out as expected, and no matter how much Fritz threw himself into his work he seemed to reach dead end after dead end. Two years ago his wife divorced him. And a week before the start of the game Fritz's employer fired him and shut down the project, which hadn't produced anything useful in its several years of existance. He has been spending the last several days in a drunken stupor, furious at the world.

Fritz is a white (German) male who is 32 years old. He has prematurely balding blond hair and muddy brown eyes. His build is fairly average, although too many nights of take-out dinner have made him rather flabby. Fritz can usually be found wearing jeans and a dirty old T-shirt with some obscure math joke on it. He has no real physical skills, although he does play a good game of tennis, his one hobby. Mentally Fritz is very intelligent, but has a very specialized area of knowledge and can be somewhat ignorant outside of it. He speaks both German and English fluently, although the latter still has a slight accent.

Personality-wise, Fritz could be summed up in one word "surly". He always has an offhand insult for anyone he views as dumber than himself (pretty much anybody). He can be stubborn and pigheaded, but when he really gets working on something he follows it through with almost obsessive effort. This is the source of both his greatest triumphs and his greatest downfalls.

Prologue: A Particularly Bad Day in the Life