339: Mater

ENTRY 339: Mater

"Children are too precious to entrust their care and development to amateurs. Being an educator takes training; it is a highly skilled activity. To say nothing of being a personal trainer, an activities coordinator, a nurse, and a bodyguard. It takes a team to raise a child, but more than that it requires a dedicated parent. Ask yourself: at what age would you teach your child about resleeving? Personal augmentation. Pornography on the Mesh. The context and subtleties of an inappropriate relationship. To know when they are being lied to. Why they are being lied to. How and when to lie themselves. These are hard questions to you, because you learned them on your own - because your parents, and their parents, and so on were amateurs. Just the few children, disparate decades of experience, already out of date by the next generation if it was passed on at all. This is why you need me - because you want the best for your child, and I am a professional."
- Mater, salespitch

Professional parenting traces its routes to organized education - the idea, almost as old as transhumanity, that teaching children was a specialized task and that biological parents were not uniquely qualified for the job just because they'd managed to insert tab a into slot b and win the prize forty or so weeks later. Mandatory public schooling has been an arsenal in civilized upbringing of young transhumans for centuries, but it is only since the Fall that cultural inertia and the breakdown of education infrastructure, and the failure of the Lost Generation that has allowed transhumans to get more ambitious and realistic when it comes to raising their young. While the transhuman family unit is far from dead, particularly among conservatives, those habitats and individuals that can afford to prefer to hire professional parents who work to develop young egos to achieve greater potential and prepare them for the rigors of contemporary transhuman society.

Mater was a pro-parent in the Jovian Republic who saw too many of her kids exposed to a toxic society, torn between stagnant cultural values, ultraconservative parents, and her push for critical and independent thinking. After a decade of raising young rebels who escaped or self-destructed, Mater vanished herself. As a freelancer at loose ends, Mater has been recruited by Firewall as an independent operator, gathering her own talent to undertake missions - often ops against other Firewall elements that are suspected to have been corrupted or gone rogue.

COG	COO	INT	REF	SAV	SOM	WIL	MOX
19	18	20	13	13	15	16	-
INIT	SPD	LUC	TT	IR	DUR	WT	DR
6	1	32	6	64	30	6	45

Morph: Splicer

Skills: Academics: Art 23, Academics: Biology 23, Academics: Chemistry 23, Academics: History 23, Academics: Physics 23, Academics: Philosophy 23, Academics: Politics 23, Academics: Sociology 23, Art: Drums 25, Art: Painting 25, Art: Singing 25, Art: Tattoos (DIY) 25, Beam Weapons 18, Blades 20, Clubs 20, Deception 26, Fray (Dodge) 23, Hardware: Electronics 20, Infiltration 33, Interests: DIY Tech 33, Interests: Education 40, Interests: Teaching Methods 40, Kinesics (Lying) 25, Kinetic Weapons 18, Language: Native Spanish 83, Language: English 80, Language: Latin 80, Networking: Autonomists 20, Networking: Criminals 10, Networking: Firewall 15, Palming 25, Perception 25, Profession: Parent 60, Protocol 30, Scrounging 23, Unarmed Combat 25

Implants: Access Jacks, Basic Biomods, Basic Mesh Inserts, Cortical Stack, Eidetic Memory, Oracles, Skillwires

Using Mater

As an ally and contact, Mater is the voice at the end of the line. Stern, humorous, compassionate, pedantic, professional, and supporting as she needs to be, the player characters are her "kids" and she will coach and guide them to the mission objective, providing support when she can and trust in their abilities when she cannot. In a neutral antagonist role, Mater might be on assignment, either running an opposing team or acting as pro-parent to one or more children - teacher-cum-bodyguard, teaching and protecting them. Mater is only likely to be a violent antagonist if she believes that the player characters (or the people they are working for) have or will directly harmed any of the children under her care.

Seed

• Mater has been kidnapped, and is being held hostage somewhere on the player character's habitat. As the only agents available, Firewall taps the player characters to find her - and time is running out. The culprits could be an exsurgent cult, or a former "student" of Mater's from the Jovian Republic gone wrong and out for revenge - or perhaps this is all a test that Mater has set up to prove the PC's abilities, so that Firewall will trust them with the real assignment...