Ignacio Rodriguez was born in the Dominican Republic, and spent most of his childhood there. He was what his elders called “travieso” — he was always getting into something that he shouldn’t have been getting into due to a natural curiosity. He always seemed to come out the other side unscathed, though, through some combination of luck and the early development of the ability to talk his way out of a good number of things.
He came to the US when he was 10, and he and his parents moved in with an aunt who ran a botanica in West New York, New Jersey. His curiosity didn’t diminish, especially in light of all the very interesting items in his new home, but he soon found that his aunt seemed to be the one person he couldn’t bullshit. She put him to work early helping her in the shop, mostly to keep him occupied. She found that he was very interested in the practices of Santeria, though, and so she taught him about that too. Between school and all of this, he managed to keep (mostly) out of trouble. He did amass a rather large group of friends and positive acquaintances, due to his knack for starting up and carrying on a conversation with just about anybody.
That is, until the fall of 2006.
He was almost at Ground Zero when the blast detonated, and got caught up in the aftermath just like everyone else. He hadn’t manifested any powers during or after the solar maximum period, so he assumed he was in the clear — until the genetic test revealed that he carried the SLC-E gene. It was certainly a surprise. But since he had no powers to classify, he remained an unknown quantity as tensions rose and chaos began to be the order of the day. His aunt, meanwhile, saw what was happening to the community, and the country at large, and so established the botanica as a safe house for SLC-E positive people to hide, or, in the most extreme cases, wait until they could get passage out of the US to various locations in the Caribbean. Ignacio assisted her in this, making contacts with the Ferrymen and eventually making the shop a safehouse for them.
Throughout this time, his powers still had not manifested. He didn’t have a lot of time to worry about it what with a constantly revolving door of hunted people around him, but he did always wonder. As he met more and more SLC-Es, he was certainly happy to help them, but there was always a weird feeling of being the kid who got picked last for a team. And of course, all wrapped up with a nice heaping handful of guilt, since…did he really want to become hunted like that? How could he justify being jealous of people who were literally dying because of who they were?
Feelings are complicated.
As events escalated into the succession of Mitchell as president and the descent into the Second Civil War, he kept up the resistance in the ways that he knew how. He got some military training from the freedom fighters, but mostly he kept doing what he did best — bullshiting his way out of trouble, and using that ability to help those who needed help by hiding them in plain sight.
Eventually, the war ended, and it was time to pick up the pieces. He still hadn’t manifested a power, and so he came to the conclusion that he was just a dud — that the test had been wrong, and there wasn’t anything special about him at all. He still had his contacts from before, and so he moved to the Safe Zone to help with the revitalization, but always with a slightly bitter taste in his mouth about being utterly unremarkable in a world full of exceptional people.
It made him a relatively easy target for Shedda Dinu.
What started as a feeling of helping people who were persecuted in the war grew into a heavy resentment of non-evolved, especially since he himself was, for all intents and purposes, non-evolved. He was very good at hiding it outwardly, but he started hearing more and more about an organization who believed that the evolved were superior, and that they deserved to be put above those who were not. It was very appealing to him.
Of course, he wasn’t as useful as someone who actually had a power that had manifested. But he did have skills that were of interest — and his place of employment was pretty useful, too. He was now the owner of the botanica where he’d worked, having been left it by his aunt, and he began selling refrain out of it to those in the know. He wasn’t the biggest distributor, but he was very reliable.
That’s where he is now — still running the botanica, still without a manifested power, though with the promise that maybe, when his ability comes into play, he will be able to take his rightful place as Evolved.