Hector Metah

Hector Metah is a character in Mini-Grand 5104.

Biography:
The funny thing about history books is that the farther back in time you go, the more liberties the history book takes with cause and effect. For instance, while we think now that the fall of Rome came out of the collapse of democracy, people experiencing the fall of Rome know it had much more to do with some strikes in the garbagemen’s union. Meanwhile, people living right around “the present,” or the time when the process of sterilizing the Earth of all biological diversity, believe they’re reacting to an energy crisis and the desperate need for resources to support an unsustainable lifestyle of pollution and urban filth. From the far future, however, the history books agree that the decisions made in this time were a reaction to a theory that arose a coupld hundred years before. This somewhat nihilistic theory states that all this biological diversity came about sort of randomly through a drawn-out bureaucratic process of natural selection.

This is ridiculous of course. The truth, unknown even in the far future, is that now and then when there isn’t a satisfactory array of life in the universe, a handful of organisms (last time it was a couple of the dinosaurs still hanging around after the Meteor) are chosen by the All-Mother to become Progenitors, catalysts of biological diversity, and where they walk Life is born in their footsteps.

Five thousand years after humanity had decided to stop mucking around with rainforests and beef and trees and diseases and planets to put them on, the All-Mother decided it was time for a shake up. So she made Hector Metah a Progenitor. It started off small—he would, say, wake up with an ant sitting on him—but in an age where nothing that isn’t human has ever lived, seeing an ant constitutes enough of a shock to drive a boy crazy. That was two months ago. Since then, the situation's gotten a fair bit worse.

Description:
Hector’s lived an okay life, as all kids do in the future, because any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from happiness. He’s about ten pounds overweight, less because he can’t control his diet and more because if he loses the weight, he gets a bit chilly at room temperature. He’s fairly intelligent within the scope of what he knows, which isn’t much. Temperamentally, his regularly lax attitude is beset by stress at his recent failures to hide the fact that his presence is bringing about the end of the age of humanity.

Hector will grow on you, if you stop trying to work out what his ethnicity is (it’s the future, they don’t exactly divide the space station into color-coded continents) and get over his time-displaced conception of English. He won’t understand words about plants and animals, like “bitch” or “sheeple.” All of these terms fell out of favor back in the generation when people could still get nostalgic for Discovery Channel specials and trips to the zoo.

Oh, and he leaves a trail of grass behind him as he walks. Come to think of it, that’s probably the easiest way to pick him out in a crowd.

Items/Abilities:
Life arises around Hector all the time, especially when he’s sleeping, or concentrating on intensifying his power. If he concentrates really hard, he can give birth, in a sense, to a creature of his own devising, and keep it as a familiar of sorts. Apart from his familiars, which always seem to die on him, nothing he creates is within his control, but none of it actively seeks to kill him, even the viruses in his bloodstream.

Development
Hector eventually learned to control his animal problem.

Victory
In the end he came to understand that his ability was a good thing and he did what he had to to get back to his world.