Mekel

Growing Up
Mekel was ripped away from his parents when he was 7 because they were part of an outlawed peyote-using sect of pan-Indigenism. All it took was a report to the Youth Protectorate on New Aztlan to suspend parental rights. But indigenous cultural nationhood was upheld and Mekel was adopted by his ethnic Quiche pueblo. Provincial children and adults do not take kindly to be challenged in their ways and so bitter feelings of feeling alone lead to silence and that fit in with the school techies - many of them emo just like him.

Aspects


 * Family ripped away
 * Hangin' with other techie emos

Starting Out
The Quiche taught him his cultural ways, but it was the Maori Pere that inducted Mekel in to the Guardians. It was with the Guardians that Mekel journeyed to Bayou, schooled in cyber-spirituality and electronic networks and returned to New Aztlan as a fully inducted Guardian of the Spirits. He also learned many of the neural vices and his addictive tendencies.

Aspects
 * Spiritual cyber power to the people


 * It can be tough to stay away from the e-Pleasuredome...

Moment of Crisis
Every Guardian must sojourn offworld to learn other ways, keep the beginner's mind and see for themself. Every ten years there must be a journey from one extreme end of the slipstream net to the other. And virtual voyages meant nada. And so while in transit heading for a first visit to Yggdrasil, Mekel served as temporary chaplain on a Guild ship named the Diplomacy's Failure. Sounded like bad karma.

from Mekel's neural blog: ''The Failure streamed into the Loki system - from Tigris - and was going to take a brief spin through and survey of Loki guildspace when the Captain apparently had some sort of intuitive feeling and decided to check out what the merchant marine likes to call hedge space. A kind of speculative real estate space that doesn't earn them much in the way of resources, but can prove to be adjacent to interesting purchases or sales in the future. I find it all too boring, but then a non-Guild ship was seen violating territorial space. The Lokian crew saw bigger guns and learned why the ship received it's name. It was pimped up even for a guild ship. (Man, I hope Pere never accesses this.)''

The crazy, damn Captain started celebrating right in front of me that he was going to be able to take a nice extended vacation on Bayou with the extra haul heading for the slave market!! Slave market?! I started accessing the 'net before I blinked an eye. "Excuse me?! Do you realize what sort of international incident this will stir up if word of this were to get out?" He starts mocking me as a man of the loincloth. Was I threatening him? Did I think I had the status of some 5th degree Guardian when I was lucky to be invited on so prestigious a Guild ship as a novice?

I started to try to explain interstellar merchant marine law in such a way that made him and his exec understand that we all come out ahead with a little mercy and compassion, but that ritual text exercise wasn't working not seven seconds into my coldly ignored soliloquy. So, as I was about to be escorted from the bridge, I told him I manage to hack a securities lien on his padded investment portfolio. It wasn't loftily spiritual one bit, but guild currency talks and I got him to listen. Could I get the crew freed? I wasn't that good... yet, but at least indentured servitude for a limited time was better than who knows what black market would've sent then hell knows where.

I only ended up bumping into one of them. He was swabbin' a deck. I think, to him, I was some backwater voodoo priest. But this new crewmember, Caid, was ripped from Loki not unlike how he had lost his family. And now life shoved him around some more? Nope, this was tripping me out. I couldn't care if this ship was going the whole way. I was getting off the damned ship at the next waystation. Too much need for greed.

Connection: Aspects
 * Got to decompress, when it gets to be too much.
 * It's already hacked or coded before you've thought of it.

Sidetracked
Before the Sojourn Mekel was on a spiritual retreat on New Aztlan. The spirit world's synchronicities: Pere Aperahama was sharing with Mekel the clever migration of the Maori to New Aztlan. He recalled the historical metaphor of the old partition of Pakistan and India on ancestral Mother - nations all around must be careful what they wish for, it could be harder for getting it. It was this interest in digging around history that brought Mekel a spontaneous history project. More of why and how the Maori, the Maya and others - not just modern indigenous peoples - came to New Aztlan. That's when he found traces of suspicious accesses to databases about the Maori spin drives. The clever path weaved made tracking the lore hunter difficult, but smudging and a few custom apps seemed to do the trick. All cybertrails lead to the Roots Reclamation Project. Who was their pointperson? Well, there were community projects and members to look after.

Shortly the Council of Artifacts was in touch and asked Mekel to ride datagun for verification. Aperahama nearly demanded to come along because he overheard (already knew?) that the Project was spotted what must've been close to the tech. He wanted to make a call, but he was asked to keep it secure. So if he wanted to ride it was going to be at that moment. The jumperjet got us halfway round the world in quick time and then it was a quick transfer to the fusioncopters. Stealth mode dropped us into an unobtrusive camp in a highland in the Maori spiritlands.

-

As if the surprise wasn't bad enough, records revealed the ringleader to be the artifact hunter himself, one Hovid Rangoon, Randee, Randeen, whatever. There's a lot more than the economic value of trying to take honored material: the spiritual relics of a people. Something was weird, though. He looked genuinely surprised to be treated as Perp #1. He would seem to turn to a few of his henchmen - almost as looking for input. Guidance, even? But, perhaps he hoped they would make a move with any sign of weakness. None was provided.

--

The press release followed the next morning and blew the scandal out into the harsh light of interstellar news and policy. The Council recommended to Aperahama that Mekel get offworld. Some form of counteroffensive might come down. He decided it was time for the cross-slipstream Sojourn. Yggdrasil ought to serve. Unfortunately the first guildship on a manifest had the unfortunate name of Diplomacy's Failure Connection: Aspects
 * thinks he can prove a causal relationship between the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle and fortuitous spiritual synchronicity? (I'm thinking...invoke for otherworldly-like luck; tag when the ancestors figure loss is for the greater good)
 * Aperahama is a mentor with national and interstellar culturally-related connections (invoke to boost culture-related rolls; tag for some sort of vulnerability as dependent)

On Your Own
What happened became one confusing jumble of memories. [ooc - for real, any help to sort through the jumble would be appreciated. lol, i need a timeline or something] There was a brief stop at Yggdrasil and he was amazed at the culture, but there was no time to stay. There had been a blast from the recent past. Hovid - a sort-of fall guy for the Project dropped him a communique and said he had all sorts of interesting dirt on corporate intrigue. No better hook could've been offered for his interest. And his story checked out. It was straight back to a rendezvous at Eden Station.

But hanging out on the Failure one second too long was all it took to get embroiled in a mutiny. No, not mutiny - liberation! O' course, liberating the Failure wasn't going to be reported that way. The great mystery works that way and Mekel bumped into Marko in the middle of all the developments happening with the Failure. He knew Caid - the one he knew from the almost enslaved Lokians. Thinking he'd have to be spiritual advisor and monitor of human rights, he was presently surprised that there was plenty of integrity and forthrightness. It was easy for others to stereotype Lokians as tricky and shifty, but they, of course, represented themselves as much more complex than a label. - Man, what in the slipstream was going to happen next?! Aspects
 * I is for Intrigue - esp. business and government
 * Culture! Must study and immerse.