Editing WARCRY (section)

==History & <s>Heroic</s>Villainous Origin==
Esperanza Juarez Guerrero worked as a visiting nurse practitioner in the poorest rural areas of [[Wikipedia:Guatemala|Guatemala]], high in the mountains.  On one visit to a particularly remote village, she found the inhabitants mourning over the bodies of three villagers who had visibly been beaten to death.  With much questioning, she learned that the village had lately been pressured by armed agents of a large logging and mining corporation, both to give up their claims on nearby land and to supply manpower for miserable pay.  The villagers added that the bodies had been found the day before by two young shepherds; the youngest, no more than ten years old, had run away from the site in terror and had not been seen since.  Those villagers who could be spared were looking for him, but few could take time away from the meagre harvest.  

Esperanza, once her duties were discharged, decided to help look for the missing boy rather than return to the dispensary she worked with, down in the lowlands.  She was literally seething with anger at the recent events, and could not bear to ignore them.  She took her beaten old truck as far up on the dirt roads as she dared, then shouldered her backpack and walked to the area where the shepherd boy has pastured his goats.  After examining the place where the three bodies had been found, she continued past, up the mountain, in the direction the other boy had indicated.  

Acting on a mere hunch she would later describe as an "itch" in her head, Esperanza followed signs that were too faint to be called tracks, up and up the mountains.  She was carried by her anger, far past the point where she should have turned back.  She had heard tales of ruins up in the mountains, tales the villagers would never share with outsiders &mdash; but Esperanza, strange as she was, shared links of Indian blood with them.  She thought the boy might have decided to hide in the ruins until the corporate mercenaries were long gone.  

She finally reached the ruins just past sundown, in a locked valley craddled high in the mountains, and had to hunker down for the night rather than risk injury in the dark.  Several times that night she thought she heard strange sounds and voices, but every time she awoke in a sweat despite the cold, she was unable to find any sign of what had woken her.  At last, the sun broke over the edge of the eastern valley wall and revealed Esperanza's surroundings.  It seemed to her as if, at the touch of the sun, every stone started singing in a separate voice.  The sun's rays brushed the only structure still half-standing, a [[Wikipedia:Mesoamerican pyramids|temple]] atop a set of badly damaged stairs.  Esperanza rose, almost hypnotized, and approached the steps leading to the temple.  She climbed over the cracked stones, past the wild encroaching growth, to the altar at the top. 

As she reached the summit, blood from her scratched and cut hands dripped in the [[Wikipedia:Chacmool|chacmool]].  A blinding light flooded the altar platform, and Esperanza felt her consciousness almost ripped from her body.  In a single moment at once of perfect understanding and utter chaos, she felt herself change.  She claims that she learned then that she was the avatar of Cihuacoatl, the Aztec goddess whose cry announces war.  According to her, Quetzalcoatl himself spoke to her and told her was entrusting her with a weapon he had wrested from Tezcatlipoca, god of night, temptation and war.

As Cihuacoatl, she felt her body fill with strength and power.  Without thinking, she took flight and revelled in her new abilities.  From the air, it became easy to find the missing boy who, hidden in the ruins, had just witnessed her transformation with awe.  She descended and approached him as he fell to his knees.  She convinced him to return to the village, and watched over him from above.

But as she kept watch over the boy, she spotted the mercenaries as they broke camp in a valley far below.  Filled again with rage, she  launched an attack, using for the first time the power of the gods.  From this day on, she claimed an ever increasing area as hers to protect, kicking out multinationals and military forces.

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