Ricardo Ortiz

Information
Race 	Human
Class 	Fighter (Champion)
Association 	Alshifa Expedition
Country of Origin	Castillia, Confederacy of Andalus
Hair 	Black
Eyes 	Dark brown
Skin 	Tan
Year of Birth 	HE 2030
Year of Death 	---
==Summary==
Ricardo Ortiz is the rare breed of person who has somehow made a career out of participation in the Confederacy of Andalus Volunteer Emergency Response Corps (CAVER Corps), having been a regular part of the Corps ever since he was a teen. Over the years he has undergone specialized, supplementary training that has entitled him to a slight increase in the nominal stipend provided to Corps members. Even with this, however, Ricardo must regularly supplement his income between tours of duty with private gigs.
In HE 2049, Ricardo was hired by a wealthy industrialist with an archaeology hobby for an expedition into the Alwaed Almaksur of northern Alshifa to search for an ancient Yuan-ti temple rumored to be found somewhere within the sands. The expedition was a disaster. Of the two dozen members, only Ricardo and one other sword for hire, Benicio Cervantes, survived. To this day, Ricardo still refuses to go into detail about what exactly happened.
And yet, when Zaeim Asutali Solkas approached him with an offer to make another attempt to find the temple, Ricardo accepted.
== Backstory ==
Ricardo Ortiz was born in the Castillian capitol of Parede Rojo, the middle child in a family of six. His parents, Jalal and Eneida, owned a brickmaking operation, and thus much of Ricardo's childhood was spent clambering about the family-owned clay quarry with his siblings until his knees and hands were caked red.
The Ortiz family lived a comfortable, mostly uneventful middle-class existence until Ricardo was twelve years old; that year, the terrasque made landfall in the region. Jalal and Eneida were on the road at the time, coming home from a business trip, and were right in the terrasque's path of destruction with no way to find adequate shelter. Jalal was crushed to death in a rockslide; Eneida survived, but suffered severe injuries that left her with limited mobility and chronic pain. Ricardo's eldest sister, Aliyah, took over the family business despite having just barely reached the age of legal adulthood. Not wanting to be an additional burden upon his sister, Ricardo joined the CAVER Corps as soon as he turned fifteen, the minimum allowed age. Not only did this allow him to be mostly self-sufficient before legal adulthood; it also allowed him to help other people avoid the fate suffered by his parents. Because the stipend provided by the CAVER Corps was so small - it was, after all, supposed to be a part-time, volunteer position - Ricardo also took on odd jobs; at first these jobs were limited to basic manual labor - harvesting fields, working in a slaughterhouse, etc. - but, as he grew older and trained more in the Corps, he started working as a hired sword for caravans into the deserts.
== Personality ==
Generally a phlegmatic and practical person, Ricardo believes that direct solutions to problems are the least likely to get people hurt - after all, the more moving parts there are in a plan, the more possible points of failure.