Guillermo Estrada

Guillermo Estrada is a mute Thyrsus mage active in Puerto Rico. Born there, he spent most of his life internationally and in-between households before going to university in Puerto Rico and settling down with his ailing grandmother.

Like most young Puerto Rican mages, his Awakening flew by unremarked and he didn't land in with any of the orders until after university.

Personality
A mute wise-ass who communicates primarily in sign language. His larynx was demolished in Panama, something that Guillermo sees as a sacred scar. He claims he can say more in relative silence than he ever could verbally, but he still makes use of clicks, whistles, the occasional broken rattle, and unvoiced noises as he pleases.

He could very easily fix his larynx, and occasionally does so when an urgent situation arises, but he refuses to leave it mended for long. "It's just not me", so he says.

He goes by the motto tattooed on his arm: Everything happens in this life. An inherently hopeful foil to his comrade Marcel, who is fatalistic to the extreme.

Survival of the craftiest is a core tenet of his, believing that aggression can only take you so far. To Guillermo, it is more important to lie in wait than to strike out in the open. In captivity, though, those rules quickly change, and it becomes survival of the fittest. We are all base creatures of instinct, after all.

Biography
Even though Guillermo was born in the Caribbean, he was only a toddler when his father, himself an American-born accountant, took Guillermo back with him to the United States where he spent his childhood. Unfortunately, that childhood was spent with a single parent.

His father and mother, Robert Estrada and Patricia Leal, had Guillermo out-of-wedlock. The marriage was quick and one of convenience. While it was never the plan to raise a child together, it didn't mean that there was any bad blood between the two. Guillermo never questioned the kind of circumstances that led to all of that, but the question remains - even if the only one who can ask doesn't feel the need to.

After all, his values are self-serving and he was taught that there is no benefit in self-doubt. In fact, when it came down to it, both parents were strictly utilitarian in raising their son.

While Guillermo wasn't traditionally smart, or even keen on attending school, he was crafty - and his father knew it. He was the kid who pulled teachers' heartstrings and robbed test answers behind their backs when he needed to. But he wasn't dumb, just average, and his grades reflected that.

While Robert instilled an understanding that the boy's actions were ethically wrong, he quietly approved whenever Guillermo would get away with things. His mother was less approving, but no less instructive; Patricia was the one to put the heart to Guillermo's tricks, poor woman.

Panama, 1986:
Most of Guillermo's summer vacations were spent either in Puerto Rico with his maternal abuela, since his paternal grandparents were dead, or in Panama City with his mother. That year, Guillermo had graduated middle school and summer vacation began early - in late April. Patricia decided to bring him over to Panama full-stop, an exciting prospect for the boy.

In practice, it wasn't all that was cracked up to be. On the grand scale of things, Guillermo went over in 1986; a year and three months before the powder keg that was Manuel Noriega's regime was set to hit its climax.

U.S. President Reagan would soon after begin his negotiations with the country, and tensions between Americans and the Panamanian Defense Force began a slow, but steep climb. The political atmosphere shrouded Guillermo's brief stay, suffice it to say. The streets were over-run by nighttime drug operations and gang-bangers ages 14 and up.

Once he had arrived in Panama, Guillermo was gone by the end of the month; it would be the last summer he ever spent there. Acclimating from just visiting to actually living in Panama was troublesome for the usual reasons. But under the skin of everything, the hang-outs and few friends he had found over the years were now alien to him, his expectations discolored by the events building up in Panama City. Friends had left the country or drifted away, and places once peaceful to the naked eye were now openly dangerous.

A storefront across from a construction site was where Guillermo and his friends met up every time he visited. They used to number five, but then it was only Guillermo plus one. They'd still shoot the shit over the course of that week, but they ran into trouble with a snot-nosed brat around their age that was trying to pick a fight, spitting bold claims that his brother was part of the PDF as if it meant anything.

The two tried to shake the little shit off nicely, but Guillermo's friend settled with just punching his way out of it. One punch was all it took before the brat ran off with his tail between his legs, never to bug them again.

Or so they thought. Around sunset the day after, Guillermo went his separate way and started heading on home. One moment, the streets were empty. The next, a motorbike was speeding around the corner. Which wasn't odd, except for the fact that it was on the wrong side of the fucking road and cruising straight towards him.

He doesn't remember hearing anything over the rip of the engine, but he remembers what he saw to this day, vividly. That little shit was on the back of the bike, sliding a baseball bat out of a bag and shouting his head off. As he and his (presumably) shithead brother zipped closer, that brat twirled the bat around and thrust it from the side like a jousting lance.

Guillermo remembers the cracking noise it made when the bat clipped his throat and flew violently off to the side; in the hands of someone competent and capable, there would have been no survival. That fucking kid's laughter was ringing in the background as they sped off, grating but soft compared to the wet gagging and hissing pouring out from his throat. Then he blacked out and didn't come to until a few days later.

To make a long and difficult story short, that's when Patricia and her son knew that he would never speak again. The details don't matter.

Thereafter, 1986-1991:
Guillermo had returned to America by the end of the month. It was a difficult and trying time for him and Robert. The idea that his son would never speak again was overpowering, the hospital bills were crushing, and the boy himself was having a mini-identity crisis. Smooth-talking was always his thing! He wasn't that good at anything else.

Physical therapy, counseling, and lessons in sign-language followed suit. Guillermo went into high school as scheduled, if vulnerable. He carried a notepad everywhere, and the first thing he would tell people was that he wasn't deaf, he could easily hear them talking shit. Something he proved on a few occasions.

High school is a strange thing. You go in with expectations and fears, and they're often not the truest. Guillermo wasn't a pariah like he felt he would be, he was an underdog. High school wasn't a vacuum full of strange and new people, a lot of his classmates knew him from before - and the bonds he invested so much in grew tighter just by the fact that Guillermo was handicapped seemingly overnight.

You think his manipulation skills suffered for being mute and crippled? No, they shone brighter and were honed farther than before. A boy who imagined he'd be mocked and ridiculed was basically a small-time hero. But that's the magic of high school, life revolves around cliques and closed systems, and Guillermo was a gear in all of them; it gave him the freedom to pull the strings his way.

His grades shot up, the teachers were eating out of his palm, and his popularity was cemented. That's that. Over the years, he actually kind of got bored - or maybe disquieted - by all of it. He was a social fixture, but he knew it wouldn't keep; lots of people think their relationships'll carry over to college or beyond, but few of them do.

And few of them did. So, he decided to take a leap of faith and travel to Puerto Rico and stay with his abuela Carmita, who had been developing dementia for some time. His father had no problems with that, as long as he continued his education.

Which is another can of worms entirely. Guillermo wasn't really good at keeping a traditional job or any kind of financial commitment. Let's not mince words, he was a god-damn crook. But a crook with a soft-spot for his grandma - originally, he was going to fake going to college until he made it. The summer he moved in with Carmita, though, she wept and told him in one of her lucid moments how proud she was of him, and how proud his mother will be. So, obviously, what does a crook do but get the most useless degree he can think of while he got the hang of things?

That's right. He signed on for a degree in Marine Biology and never looked back.