Blondie

Context is a futuristic dystopian setting. With robot fights. Because.

Laborer in one of TECTOs warehouses for as long as he can remember. Couldn't afford to finish any of the schools he ever attended and a lower economic status allowed -forced him- for a much younger entry into TECTOs work and regulation system.

TECTO is cannibalistic and gargantuan, a company so great and powerful it is almost deified. It is the grandfather of countless equally humongous companies and is ruled almost entirely by AI from start to finish. Its buildings are scattered across the world like monuments to tragedy. The company composition is so convoluted it's unsure if the company even has a CEO anymore, let alone CTO, COO or people below that. They produce unknown products that go places unable to be tracked down, for reasons lost in an AI so complex it transcended code and has taken a life of its own, funded by boards of deepfake investors that never existed at all. And above all, TECTO has become so big it is unstoppable. Where its warehouses and factories pop up from one month to the next, corresponding city states begin to form, little sovereign nations with crownless faceless rulers. 

Blondie is one of the company's invisible laborers. He lives onsite in the sprawling company city state, having to pay the company for the privilege of living in an apartment with appliances tracked and managed entirely by the TECTOs living quarter control system. Pay the company for the privilige to eat, sleep, live for them. All money, every dime, back into the machine. Never talked to a human being during the entire hiring process (and besides his fellow payroll colleagues has never met anyone from TECTO that was real). Blondie works on the lowest groundfloors of one of TECTOs underground warehouses, a humongous megalith that goes deep into the ground. He does the forgotten backbreaking work that automation failed to replace long ago for depressing reasons he doesn't care to consider.

He owns a mech, as do his fellow floor employees, to aid with the heavy labor. TECTO company policy allows for their employees to own mechs from a list of approved models, often favorable due to shoddy equipment otherwise provided onsite. Mech origins lay in the military (like many things do), but at their release were already outdated in a furiously progressing and automating world. Now mechs are used for labor and sport, and wars are fought solely from the inside of computers.
 
Blondie's own mech is a CAT-m, an almost three meter tall mech where the pilot is seated inside the mech in their entirety. It is an old discontinued military model that was never used for fighting but for construction of overnight military bases in hotzones, several generations old long before everything was replaced with AI. The CAT is flexible, quick footed, tuned to hell and back, capable of incredible strength and surprising flexibility with steady footing for the multipurpose terrain for which it was originally developed. Gets incredibly hot when put to constant fast exertion, as well as being physically straining to operate. There is poor ventilation inside. The CAT is well insulated, but not from the heat produced by its own construction.

Blondie has converted and tuned the thing to an unconventional lightweight fighting mech; he partakes in illegal mech boxing matches on company grounds. He has to win a fight before the CAT overheats - forcing Blondie's hand to fight fast and viciously. Despite this he is a rising star, a new talent on established bloodthirsty grounds of desperate people. He is finally newly funded by his first sponsor (his newly appointed manager and former fling who has motives he can’t figure out), and now Blondie stands to go beyond just breaking even with medical costs and repairs for the CAT and to finally to take titles and possibly a way out.

The sport is physically demanding, expensive, vicious, unregulated and dangerous with a sordid crowd, but above all - there is money to be made. 

Arrogant, boisterous showboat. Ambitious and flamboyant. Loves nothing and no one as much as he loves money and fame. Mistakes desperation for focus and hopelessness for discipline. Grew to need the self-destructive pain when he stopped looking for something to look forward to, at an age far too young to forego all the good in life. Loves to fight, lives for it. When he's not fighting he's going through the motions, always downward a spiral. Doesn't value his own life very much, nor those of others, a dark little inkling. A personality deeply prone to addictions in all forms yet uncomfortable with indulgence. Has a morbid sense of joy and an inappropriate sense of humor. Found its easier to be hated than to be loved, easier to receive a punch than to be held. Like every person around him he's deeply lonely, completely unable to from real human connections or form human experiences in a world where there are none left for free.

Has made himself easy to love and easier yet to hate, popular in the show business for reasons both good and bad. A ridiculous loud man. Petty, embraced his own infamy and turned it into his brand instead. Has forgotten how to distinguish what parts of him are real and which are carefully tailored for you to remember him by. Has forgotten whether they were ever different things. Doesn't care what you think of him, as long as you think of him.

Not someone to root for, but fantastic to look at.

Given the nickname Blondie for the color of his hair. Leaned into it, so his opponents can get beat by a guy named Blondie.