حجر - Hijr means stone - as in, one stone catching two birds (or a bird and a minotaur in this case).  A small pun by the Bedouin, as the word is synonymous with 'understanding' or 'perceptivity'.

FBA (chemsealed, YNT Softweave, Electrochromic) delivered in 24 days on July 31 2021

Spirit index: 2

Wild index: 23

Rep:

UNATCO: 3

FBI: +6

ACCRUING SPIRIT INDEX

The following actions increase a character’s Spirit Index

by the listed amount:

• Disrupting a normal spirit: 1

• Destroying disrupted spirit in its native metaplane:5

• Banishing then conjuring the same spirit: 2

• Rebinding: 1 per Binding Test beyond the first

• Binding a Free Spirit: 5

• Permanently Banishing/Destroying a Free Spirit: 5

• Long-term Binding: 10

• Fettering: 20

• Using Resist Drain power: 5

• Using Spell Binding spirit service: 20

• Exposing spirit to toxicity/corruption: 1 per hour

• Exposing spirit to mana void: (Background Count) per hour

• Losing an ally spirit: 20

ACCRUING WILD INDEX

• Destroying disrupted toxic spirit in its native metaplane: That spirit’s Force x 2

• Cleansing disrupted toxic spirit: That spirit’s Force x 3

• Destroying a toxic power site: That power site’s Rating x 5

• Cleansing a toxic power site: That power site’s Rating x 10

• Releasing a spirit with services remaining: 1 per service lost

• Banishing a spirit controlled by a mage: 2 per service lost

• Temporarily awakening a slumbering wild spirit: 1

• Permanently awakening a slumbering wild spirit: That spirit’s Force

• Creating an ally spirit: That spirit’s Force

• Willingly setting an ally spirit free: That spirit’s Force x 3

• Successfully calling a wild spirit: 1

• Accepting a spirit marker: (Spirit marker’s Rating)

• Breaking a spirit marker: Subtract twice what was gained

• Binding a spirit of any kind: Subtract that spirit’s Force

• Bringing toxicity to a natural area: –1

• Bringing toxicity to a power site: Subtract that power site’s Rating

• Turning a spirit toxic: Subtract that spirit’s Force x 2

• Destroying a power site: Subtract that power site’s Rating x 5

• Turning a power site toxic: Subtract that power site’s Rating x 10

ASTRAL REPUTATION

A character’s Astral Reputation begins at 0. For every 25 points of Spirit Index a character accumulates, his Astral Reputation increases by 1. When performing Summoning, Binding, or Banishing Tests or when conducting interactions with spirits that require using social skills, a character incurs a negative dice pool modifier equal to his Astral Reputation.

WILD REPUTATION

A character’s Wild Reputation begins at 0. For every 25 points of Wild Index a character accumulates, their Wild Reputation increases by 1. When calling a wild spirit or conducting interactions with wild spirits that require social skills a character gains a positive dice pool modifier equal to his Wild Reputation.  A character can reduce their Astral Reputation by permanently sacrificing 2 points of Wild Reputation for every point of Astral Reputation.

A cross between a college professor, a heretic imam, and a literal bird.

In his animal form, Hijr is a honey buzzard with mottled feathers with a white underbelly.  In his metahuman form, his fur has the same mottled markings, his horns are curvy but not particularly sharp, and he tends towards casual wear and the occasional tweed jacket, sometimes bringing out the old burnoose and kafiyeh if it's going to be hot outside.  He's quite fidgety, moving from foot to foot, liftings objects up to observe them, or playing with the Matrix (when it's working for him, which is only occasionally).  He enjoys the theory of magic and arcana in an earnest, almost childlike way, but his knowledge is surprisingly deep.  He enjoys hiking and backgammon.

Hijr's first memory - at least, one that can be expressed in human terms - is when he was digging a particularly stubborn wasp's nest out of under a tree stump near what he now thinks was Luxor.  Unable to get a firm grip on it with his talon, Hijr found himself clutching a hornet's nest with a very large, very firm fist.  This also coincidentally came with a loss of the well-layered and oiled feathers that usually kept the hornets from stabbing him, though, so his first memory also includes hooting in agony before jumping into the Nile.  ("You might say my reach exceeded my grasp!  Ho!  Oho!")

Though he didn't think too much of it, the quickly kindling spark of sentience led Hijr to become an avid people-watcher; the Nile had no shortage of Bedouin tribespeople, and the traffic became more than an annoyance and something of a curiosity.  He began to venture further inland, following the tracks of various expeditions into Egypt, particularly those whose lights were particularly shiny - something he now realizes he was instinctively assensing.  ("What can I say?  I liked the pretty lights.  Like fireflies dancing.  Have you ever eaten a firefly?  They're not bad.")

Eventually, this curiosity got the better for him ("Their colours were extra-bright.  Or it might have been the kafta MRE.  I thought it was the world's biggest grub."), and he swooped into a survival tent late in the evening to study a particularly shiny aura in closer detail.  Eight feet of naked minotaur being what they were, of course, it didn't take long for the denizen, an Apep Consortium arcanoarchaeologist, to realize they had an uninvited guest in their tent, squatting uncomfortably close to his face.

However, after realizing that he was, in fact, not an assassin - and, in fact, could not read, or talk, and was also having some trouble walking on feet, and began squealing and flapping his arms in the air wildly when startled - he assensed the critter and realized the circumstances.  As it turned out, the expedition's dowser and assistant program manager, Ibrahim, was a bit of an amateur falconer; through a combination of cajoling bits of goat jerky and a Mindnet, he charmed the bird enough to spend a few days taking a crash course in society.  The bird got the nickname of "Hijr" from the Bedouin guides escorting the researchers, who were endlessly amused by the young man's attempts to explain to an illiterate minotaur that screeching for food was unnecessary and that he could just open the protein bar pack himself, with his thumbs, like so...

Ibrahim, despite not being much of a father figure, realized Hijr could be much more than a charity case.  Genuinely curious and intelligent in a way most people were not, Hijr began to rapidly assimilate language, magic, and terrestrial locomotion.  After returning from the expedition several weeks later, Hijr had managed to understand enough of the civilized world that Ibrahim was able to press for more.  Nesting in the nearby slums, Ibrahim occasionally managed to smuggle Hijr into Al-Azhar as something of a familiar-surrogate while the Apeps and IRM facilitated his apprenticeship to the shadowy underbelly of magical heresy in Egypt.

Hijr spent much of his formative years steeped in the scholarship of the Middle East - he learned quite a bit about magic, though somewhat less about how to fit into ordinary (that is, legal) secular society.  With the peculiar ease of a creative child, Hijr syncretized the mystical and philosophical teachings of Arab sheikhs, Apep hermetics, and Egyptian heka into his own personal religion, a pantheistic Islamic-Egyptian belief in Ra as the supreme creator, giver of life, the Qur'an, and the metaphorical flame of cognition - particularly to himself.  His philosophy, complicated as it is, he keeps mostly to himself at Ibrahim's urging ("He's still learning Arabic, you see.  We can't even get him to stop eating bugs.")

After Ibrahim graduated from Al-Azhar, he stepped up his partnerships with both the Apep Consortium and his political involvement the Islamic Renaissance - partnerships that began to pay healthy dividends, but also drew unwanted attention.  Whether it was fundamentalists, a rival research team, or shadowrunners is unknown, but a hit on Ibrahim's team in Crete left him with a heavy limp and a paranoid streak; the Apep Consortium agreed with his suggestion for a relocation to a more neutral city to recover and establish an alternative power base.  

Several very uncomfortable hours with a bird in a t-bird later, both Hijr and Ibrahim have touched down in Seattle under new aliases  - such as it matters for a bird nesting on Council Island ("Everything here is so fresh!").  Ibrahim has put his eccentric foster-son to work with his newly verified fixer's account on the Runnerhub.  Currently, he's billing Hijr's rather peculiar set of skills as a sort of Astral overwatch-slash-mascot for teams looking for a bit of slightly unorthodox magical support - with a special bit of instruction to keep an ear (horn?) to the ground for telesma and more exotic products moving through the Seattle Sea Run, of course.