Mishi Rossini's Page

Mishi has never been well off, but that's never concerned him. Born in 2458 into poverty in one of the many cities above the earth's uninhabitable surface, his fate was already likely sealed. His mother disappeared under mysterious circumstances when he was an age too young to remember her, and he was raised and educated by his father. As soon as he was old enough to be of use, Mishi was brought into the family trade of smuggling guns under the false pretence of transporting waste in their beaten up old ship they had stolen. The work was dangerous, and the pay was poor. Each job brought with it the risk of lengthy imprisonment or worse, and they would barely scrape together the money to keep a roof over their heads. Still, this was all Mishi had known and to him, having seen the lives of some others in the depths of the city, having one's own roof was something of a luxury.

Although impossible to prove, everyone knew the reason behind Mishi's mother's disappearance. The Corporations hadn't managed to catch his parents in the act of their illegal trade, but they had grown concerned at the size the smuggling trade as a whole had grown to and had issued public threats to those making their living from it. They feared an uprising. Of course these threats fell on deaf ears, and soon after members of the slum communities began to disappear. Mishi's mother being one of them. Mishi was always brought up to despise the Corporations, and this is a sentiment rooted deeply into him.

20 years after his birth, in 2478, Mishi was on another gun running job, on the return trip back to the city when the day's work came to an undesirable end. Times were particularly hard in the slums and people had started to turn on each other. As their old ship was passing into the confines of the city it was jumped by a group of men who wanted the ship and its load of guns for themselves. Mishi and his father were threatened at gunpoint, but the robbers, in their twisted morality, were happy to let their fellow social rejects go without harm if they handed over the ship and its cargo. They did so, and were left watching their most important possession drift away to the sounds of hysterical laughter.

They had escaped with their lives, but for how long? The already tiny economy of the slums was in decline and now they had no means to get any work at all. Mishi's father had always maintained a higher morality than people like those who had robbed them, and he refused to do the same to other poor slum dwellers. He might be able to maintain himself, but he knew the city had nothing left for his son. Would another city provide a better life? It was impossible to know, but he had to try. With the last of his money he arranged for one last smuggling trip. This time the cargo was Mishi, and the destination was Insilico.