Editing Rashidi Newong (section)

== Background: ==

Rashidi grew up in the backwater highlands of Algol. Many of the people there were native, but others came to escape the oppression of the Consortium. Life in the highlands was harsh, but it was also free—and the highlanders took pride in both. Rashidi’s father Batuk Newong never traveled far from the town both he and Rashidi were born in, but Rashidi’s mother Nissi Shakili was an outsider, from the city of Yasul, where she was born into a Zenithian family, with comfortable positions in the Consortium—something she rebelled against when she learned how oppressive the Consortium was. Nissi and Batuk were an unlikely couple and sometimes their marriage was strained because of this, but they stuck with it. Nissi wanted to make sure that Rashidi had a knowledge of the wider world beyond the Algol highlands, so made sure she read widely about the peoples of the Third Horizon. After Rashidi reached sixteen, they took a few clandestine tips into Algol’s cities, so she could see what life was like there.

Rashidi respected the rebels like her mother who sought to strike at the Consortium, but from a young age, she was drawn to the Church of the Icons. She inherited her mother’s desire to help people, but sought more hands-on ways to do so. She apprenticed to the local clergy, training as a local priestess and wise woman, but felt the tug of mystical prayer pulling at her as well. She eventually began living as a hermit on the outskirts of town, healing and counseling those who came to seek her out for help, spending time immersed in prayer and fasting when she was not. Eventually, she began to have mystical visions, believing the Icons were speaking directly to her.

Rashidi is unsure what it is the Icons are trying to tell her, so she has undertaken a pilgrimage, leaving her home in the highlands of Algol to travel the Third Horizon, seeking knowledge and wisdom. As she goes, she helps people where she can and seeks to encourage people to live according to the tenets of the Icons (as she understands them), counseling others to walk the path of virtue. In seeking to save souls, she is more concerned with the deeds people do than the specifics of what they believe. Her own training in the formal tenets of the Icons’ faith is somewhat limited, given her apprenticeship in a temple in the backwater highlands of Algol.

Rashidi is clearly an outsider to the more cosmopolitan world of the Third Horizon, but this does not bother her. From her mother, she learned enough of this world to have some basic understanding of it and her faith and her prophetic visions give her the confidence to take situations she does not understand or where she is treated with disdain in stride.