Mignon Demonte; Fille Malheureuse

[Orin]

Decades ago, a Gallic man by the name of Rouillé Demonte found himself in a promising and unfortunate set of circumstances. While his family once was one of some means, poor business dealings and poorer mechanisms of coping with their misfortune left them with little more than debts and a small few tenuous connections with more advantageous sorts. The crown needed eyes and ears on distant sectors—on people and places that many knew little about. It was a precarious prospect, but as ill-suited to such a task as Rouillé was, he stood to gain too much to pass on such an opportunity. He would rise above the mistakes of his father and mother, to clutch something greater than the sad legacy they had written.

And so he was whisked off to parts unknown, taking on the role of the everyman—a blue collar nobody, hauling scrap, taking orders from those of lesser means than the meager laurels he once rested upon. It soon enough felt like a cruel fate, but he reminded himself of what he stood to gain if he could just accomplish what he set out to do. Self pity would do him no favors, and he well knew that his new place was one of necessity, to avoid unwanted attention, and foster a network that would lend itself to the informational role he was to play.

As the years spun by, however, all the man found himself with were new woes. The connections he sought to nurture only led him into new debts, and little of value for himself or the motives he was obligated to follow. It became easier to lose himself in worry, self-loathing, fear of what may befall him without the results he so desperately needed to find. He well knew that time was a commodity he did not have a great deal of as tensions grew throughout the sector, momentous happenings and stirrings through the houses. It would be some time before some sort of deadline came to pass for him, but skittishness was in his nature, and so he ran.

In effort of disconnecting himself from his old role, he hitched a ride to the last place he thought one may find a rust dweller like himself, and started a new life in Kusari. It was a modest existence, but he found some solace in that it was a peaceful one, and one that it distanced him from the responsibilities that weighed so heavy before. He married an average woman and led an average life, fathering an average child and finding himself striving for an average place in Sirius that avoided any number of terrifying eventualities he envisioned.

These humble notions would crumble down as his rusty roots would come to light to ones who saw men like him as a stain on his new home. The Hogosha made life difficult for Rouillé and his family, and the glue that held them together was flimsy at best. His marriage degraded, and new debts and difficulties mounted along with the old ones—forgotten perhaps, but never gone. When push came to shove, Rouillé had no traction to hold onto what he had built for himself in Kusari, and with a less-than-wanted young daughter in tow, he soon found himself working off his old debts among the Junkers.

Years passed, and even with the emergence of Gallia, little changed for the fellow outside of increased prejudice and dirty looks. He was beneath even the lowest around him, and all but forgotten to his old countrymen. All he had created of any value was another life, a daughter that quickly saw her blithering failure of a father for what he was, distancing herself from the man the same as most of those around him as soon as she was able. Whatever became of Rouillé Demonte, finding one who knows or cares would be a difficult task, whether or not he met a grisly end for his Gallic roots, and ulterior motives.

Mignon Demonte cared little to find out as she came of age, facing her own woes of prejudice and difficulty in a sector plagued by conflict and distrust. She made no effort to hide her roots, her name—she saw little point in the desperate, evasive actions of the man who feigned to raise her properly. She had no say in where she came from, or who fathered her; the only thing that mattered, she thought, was what she was able to accomplish by the work of her own hands. The men and women around her were decent role models, if not only by way of showing her that hard work bore fruit—wages, food and board, a modest living, but a worthwhile one all the same.

Was it enough? She asked herself that question often, and just as often had difficulty coming up with a good answer. Rouillé hungered for more, and took risks to attain something better than what life—or his last foolish endeavor—handed him, but he only continued to buy out more grief for himself. That wasn't something Mignon wanted; the last thing she wanted was to repeat that man's mistakes, but she was hardly satisfied with a life of nothing but sweat and rust. The stars called out louder than the hiss and groan of Vieques, and the young woman grew tired of working herself weary building ships she wasn't behind the cockpit of herself, and at the behest of another.

Scrounging together what little funds she had, depriving herself of the only simple luxuries that life in the shipyard afforded her for long enough to amass a pitiful stack of credits, Mignon got her hands on a wreck of a small mining vessel, cooked by the Puerto Rican Rift and useless to anyone but a determined grease monkey like herself. She was just buying out more work for herself, swimming against the current, but she decided it was more than her father ever accomplished. She decided that effort was worth something, and that it was the first step towards something better.