Maximilian Stahl [Peacekeeper]

At a glance, Max doesn't much look like a Peacekeeper.

What with his 'just enough to get by' mentality, he doesn't have the sharp, clean lines most people might associate with an officer of the law; Max lets his reddish-brown hair grow long on top, just outside of regulation, and only bothers to trim it when anyone of importance might care enough to call him out on it. He begrudgingly keeps his face clean-shaven on duty, but the moment his weekend begins Max greatly prefers the two-day beard. Perhaps the only reason his uniform is ever presentable is that he often bullies his enlisted subordinates into maintaining it for him, being far too preoccupied with his studies (who has the time to get all that dog hair out, really?) or something about as equally inventive.

Though he generally doesn't care for military appearance, Max does care greatly about his physique and goes to great lengths to stay in shape... Though less out of necessity being a Peacekeeper, and much more out of self-preservation; having been the scrawny underdog growing up, Max very much likes the security his size and strength affords him. Like other Peacekeepers, Max is trained in self-defense and riot control; however, he's been known to fight dirty. Though he stands a solid 6 feet tall and weighs in around 175 pounds, lacking the training of a Career leads him to use underhanded tactics to gain the upper hand in a fight. It's earned him more than a few black eyes, and his nose is crooked from being broken more than once.

With Max's temper, most people know him when he looks angry; green eyes narrow, brows furrowed, jaw set. Every once and a rare while, though, he can be caught with a smile (he'll refuse to believe that his dimples are 'cute'); usually when he thinks he's alone with his dogs. Though he will deny it until he's blue in the face, he can also be overheard speaking to his dogs as if he were having a (one-sided) conversation with another person; Max considers himself good at his job, however in spite of how well he gets along with his personal canine partner, he has a smattering of scars on his hands from being bitten by his patients and one medical-school fumble with a scalpel (which, if asked, he'll insist was from mishandling a kitchen knife).

People are often surprised to find that Max is not only graceful, but rather acrobatic when his weapon of choice, a bo staff, is placed in his hands. Having been small and unimposing for the better part of his childhood, becoming hard to hit was his first survival strategy. Even now that Max has bulked up, he's still equally flexible and capable of performing acrobatic feats of evasion and diversion.

Maximilian rarely makes a good first impression.

At best, Max is unapproachable; at worst, he can be outright hostile. Age and whittling down his time left with the Peacekeepers have tempered Max's once infamously short fuse, but have made him no less irritable or misanthropic. Even now that he's in the twilight years of his tour of duty, Max is still notoriously intolerant of what he views as stupidity or incompetence; unfortunately for Cadets fresh out of the academy, their inexperience tends to be misinterpreted as both, making him something of a boogeyman to the junior Peacekeepers in his precinct. Not that more senior enlisted or officers are spared his ire, so much as they're simply more practiced at staying out of his way.

In the same vein, Max has few reservations about voicing his opinions about people, and rarely are they positive. While in his junior officer days Max was known for yelling, these days his wrath is delivered at normal volume with a practiced degree of sarcasm. Equally terrifying (especially for juniors) is his lack of hesitation to voice his displeasure about something, even in front of other Peacekeepers... and he does so with great regularity.

With that being said, however, any positive reception that might come from Max should be taken as the highest of compliments. Max is rarely impressed, and expressing his satisfaction is his subdued way of giving praise.

As a Peacekeeper, Max does have the ability to put on a straight, neutral face... though only for exactly as long as he has to. He maintains the "only as much as necessary" mindset regarding many of his duties as a Peacekeeper; in-regulation appearance, military bearing, respecting his superiors... Always just enough to fly under the radar. The standards he holds his colleagues to is much higher; Max is a stickler for punctuality, formality and enlisted respect to officers, and has little tolerance for breaches of etiquette (hypocritically so).

It's important to note that in spite of Max's temper and general lack of sociability to anyone he believes is stupider than he is, is that Max is much more intelligent than he tends to let on. Having extensively studied veterinary medicine and shown a knack for handling the Peacekeepers' police and attack dogs, he's actually very book-smart and knows his academic disciplines well. Of course, it's also made him something of an insufferable know-it-all, being more educated than the majority of his colleagues. Max is also very aware that his competency at his job is what allows him to get away with much of his bad behavior, and will devour one book after another to build his knowledge to stay one step ahead of his colleagues in the same disciplines.

Perhaps the only person Max truly gets along with is his police K9 (Max treats them like people and has no problems referring to the dogs as such); though he generally dislikes most people, Max gets along well enough with animals and absolutely adores his dogs. Having trained his companion in the manner of a police dog (as well as throwing around his weight as an officer), he usually has the dog nearby even when on duty. In regards to people, well... Max will never admit to having been the scrawny, scrappy little kid that he was, but he has a very hard time turning his back on a fellow underdog, feeling somewhat indebted to the Peacekeeper that showed him how to defend himself.

Since the 70th Hunger Games, Max has been quieter; not necessarily friendlier, but certainly less angry. He harbors a great deal of regret and bitterness over the loss of his protege who volunteered to be a tribute for District 2, not that he'll ever talk about it with anyone. But since having reconciled with his family, Max has been... lost. Having been driven by spite for so much of his life, he's in the process of trying to find himself all over again; caring for Olivia's dog and being a better man for his sisters and nephew to look up to have begun to fill that void, though he's still walking on eggshells, not yet feeling like he deserves their forgiveness.

Maximilian Emmerich Stahl wasn't born into the typical background of a Peacekeeper.

He was born the youngest and only son to a family of six in District 8, and from the very beginning was expected to go into the so-called 'family business' as a factory worker. Max's father was rarely at home, slaving away in the factories all day, leaving young Max at home to be doted on incessantly by his mother and 5 older sisters. In spite of the fact that the family had relatively little in the way of material possessions, being the baby of the family and the only boy meant that he was spoiled rotten. Though he didn't have any extraordinarily close or tumultuous relationships with any of his sisters at the beginning, Max spent the most time with his youngest sister Mitzi being the closest in age. She would be the initial catalyst that encouraged him to look beyond the so-called 'family business'.

In the rare moments that Max did manage to get to himself, he often liked to disappear in pursuit of what little wildlife he could find. When he was very young, it was mostly limited to bugs and the occasional frog. As he grew older, Max became less interested in creepy-crawlies and toads, and instead started taking an interest in the strays that often prowled the alleyways. Any of his sisters and his mother could talk at length about the various puppies, kittens, rabbits and birds he would bring home, asking if wide eyes if they could keep the creature. Initially, he would be sent back outside to return the animal to where he'd found it; even if his mother and oldest sister relented to let him keep an animal in the house for a little while, Max's father was far less tolerant, saying they couldn't afford to feed another mouth and that he'd have to take care of the creature himself if he wanted it so badly.

Max reached his teenaged years, and despite the attention lavished on him by his mother and sisters was a reclusive and generally introverted young man; he greatly preferred the company of animals. Though he was disallowed from having a pet of his own, Max often went out of his way to slip some of the local strays scraps from the dinner table; it was his getaway from having to socialize with his schoolmates, who often targeted the quiet, scrawny kid as their source of entertainment. On one such occasion, a handful of boys and girls followed him home, finding one of the dogs Max tended to; they tethered the dog to a fence and began throwing rocks at it. Max caught them in the act, first trying to stop them and being shoved aside for his troubles; instead he put himself in front of the dog, being pelted with rocks until his assailants got bored and left.

Around the same time, Max was slowly making friends with one of the local Peacekeepers who had bailed him out of a fight once; after this instance in particular, the young man had taken Max under his wing. Every day after school, he would run to the Peacekeeper's home, where he would spend hours showing Max how to fight (and as he got better, how to defend someone else). With time, and with the help of a growth spurt at the age of 14, Max slowly but surely turned into a scrapper with a reputation for fighting dirty. His sisters weren't particularly happy to see their baby brother coming home scraped up, bruised and dirty; his father was the least pleased to find out that he was being taught to fight by a Peacekeeper of all things. By the time Max had reached 17 years old, his mind was made up; he didn't want to be a factory worker, he wanted to be like his mentor and become a Peacekeeper.

Though he'd already been persuaded on the matter, Max's mentor took him into a recruiting station, and knowing him well enough by now informed him of the possibility to work with the police dogs or muttations the Peacekeepers used. He was sold; hook, line and sinker. Heinrich was furious when he found out; the law had stolen his son away, and he gave Maximilian an ultimatum: if he became a Peacekeeper, he wasn't welcome to show his face in his home anymore.

Max signed his contract the next day.

The details of his time at the Academy weren't particularly memorable, but after he graduated Max was relentless in pursuing the chance to work as a canine handler like his mentor had mentioned. The Peacekeepers, however, had other ideas; Max's mentor had mentioned his aptitude for learning, and rather than keep this ambitious Cadet at the lowly status of a canine handler, was sent to veterinary school. Max, it turned out, had a voracious appetite for the disciplines his new education presented him; he graduated a year early from his training school, and has since been working as an officer for the Peacekeepers for the past several years. It's worth noting, too, that shortly after his graduation was when Max found his best friend Kaiser. The pup was alone and crying in an alley, cowering under a dumpster; as he had done in the past, Max took the puppy home, utterly in love and nursing it back to health. This time, however, he found that there was no father figure to demand he put the dog back where he found it; with time and training (and Max's pulling strings and throwing his weight around as an officer), Kaiser has become his constant companion.

When Max was a First Lieutenant, he took on a protege by the name of Olivia Revenue; initially, he found the short, sassy, temperamental girl obnoxious and utterly intolerable. Even he can't entirely explain how she managed to worm her way under his skin; perhaps the fact that she wasn't deterred by Max's abrasive attitude, the fact that she loved dogs (almost) as much as he did, or that she didn't take any of his crap. Either way, however reluctantly, Max let his guard down... in the way that Max typically did, with obnoxious (sometimes insulting) nicknames and a lot of tough love. While Olivia's influence did nothing to change Max's opinion of Careers, he did start to consider that there could be exceptions to the rule.

It was Olivia's influence that broke Max's stubbornness and persuaded him to go home when the Peacekeepers informed him that his father Heinrich had been hospitalized.

Max went to District Eight, tall and strong and utterly terrified to face his family again, only to be welcome with open arms he didn't for a moment feel like he deserved; in particular, he met his nephew by his youngest sister, a little boy named Koah who loved animals every bit as much as Max did, and looked at his uncle like a superhero that he was a veterinarian.

He went to see Heinrich.

Max went to the hospital, expecting Heinrich to still be angry with him for leaving to become a Peacekeeper, prepared to rub his success in his father's face and leave.

Against all expectations, Heinrich's normally impassive facade glassed over with tears, apologizing to his only son for driving him away, for what he had done to make his baby boy grow into such a cold man, and begging for his forgiveness though Max would have every right to deny giving it of him. With seven years of hurt and anger and spite drained out of him in one fell swoop, Max did the only thing he could think of; he cried at his father's bedside, for a long, long time.

It seemed as though the relief of reconciliation was meant to be short-lived as Max returned home, utterly uncertain who he was now that raw anger was no longer driving him; Olivia volunteered as tribute in the 70th Hunger Games.

The rage came back for a little while, with no small amount of betrayal; Max had been so certain that Olivia was different, that she wanted to use her skills to become a Peacekeeper like him. Feeling once again like he had been stabbed in the back, Max was the only one to visit Olivia in the Justice Building before she boarded the train that would take her to the Capitol, and threw his dogtags at her.

He was there to witness her death on screen. With her father incarcerated, her mother committed and her brother six feet under, Max was the only one at the train station to receive her body when it returned from the arena, and the only one to pay his respects. Max buried her with his dogtags, her dog's collar and the bo staff he had given her when she had been training under him to become a Peacekeeper; he in turn has been taking care of Olivia's dog, some small part of him hoping it will redeem him for the things he said in the Justice Building.

And once again, Max has shut the rest of the world out.


Other: Odair
Heinrich Stahl- Father
Gretchen Stahl - Mother
Katja Stahl - Oldest sister
Yvonne Stahl - 2nd Sister
Liesel Stahl - 3rd Sister
Erika Stahl - 4th Sister
Mitzi Stahl - Older twin