Mateo
#clean-up
Traits
Bio
Uncle Mateo’s genius is balanced out by paranoia.
While at first appearing as solemnly stoic as his wife Ester, one quickly realizes that he expresses his anxiety through action rather than demeanor.
Where his family saw paradise, he saw sinister secrets. No place they were carried to in a storm could be any sort of promised land.
And a s soon as Starshead Village was established, he began preparing for the worst.
As others built their bungalows, he built bunkers. He spends hours in his workshop within the remnants of The Shadoka that weren’t scraped for parts, tinkering, his every invention functioning to provide what is needed without relying on the foods within the islands’ depths, as if to eat of its plant-life would be as eating lotus blooms or pomegranate seeds.
He stockpiles cargo from the The Shadoka’s wreck in preparation.
For what? Who knows.
He believes only the sea provides pure resources, eating only of its fish and drinking of water purified from the brine.
But in truth, Mateo’s paranoia was not always so prevalent. It was born during The Storm that struck The Shadoka, where his young son Luca was pinned beneath a broken spar as the ship wrecked, and nearly killed.
Though Ester and Mateo were able to save him, Luca permanently lost the use of one of his legs.
And Mateo was scarred from the experience.
In the early days on Starshead, Mateo became overprotective, often so preoccupied with ensuring his family’s physical well-being, that he failed to see how his strictness affected them emotionally.
For this reason, as he reached adolescence, Luca became more and more distant, frustrated and stifled by his father’s rules, and moving out into his older cousin MC’s home as soon as he was able.
It was then that Mateo realized that he had gone too far. He visited Nomalanga for counselling, and, with her help, began to work on letting go, on accepting his children’s independence, and taking time to be as considerate of his family’s feelings and contentment as he was of their
He fosters a much better relationship with his younger child, Isabel, and is now well-beloved for how hard he works to help the family in the day-to-day, bringing a breezy efficiency to their lives on Starshead Island, showing through his acts of service how much he cares.
