Abel was raised from a young age by his uncle in the Bracken Rig mining colony after his parents passed in a tunnel collapse. Scraping by on the hazardous mining rigs, Abel grew up hard and hungry for something more.
When he wasn’t hauling promethium ore, Abel was venturing into the played-out abandoned mines, scavenging for any discarded tech or artifacts from the colony’s previous prospectors. This cultivated his curiosities about the ancient civilizations that once inhabited those tunnels.
At 17, Abel started putting the pieces together that his small but growing collection of excavated relics seemed to possess strange properties and energies. He spent years obsessively studying their capabilities when triggered correctly and the potential riches they could bring on the artifact black markets.
Abel got his first true taste for adventure when he joined a roving artifact hunting crew at age 24. They followed faint leads on unexplored alien dig sites across several frontier systems, periodically striking decent hauls. But Abel’s brash risk-taking and dreaming bigger strained his partnerships.
It was during a solo expedition into the unmapped Sephran Canyons that a lucky stumble led Abel to uncovering a major ceremonial artifact cache from the extinct Praedori civilization. The substantial payday from fencing those relics allowed him to pursue his own artifact hunting ventures full-time.
Around this time, the dashing but roguish 29-year-old Abel met the sophisticated Vera while selling some of his salvage on the seedier markets of New Arcadian City. He was instantly smitten by her refined beauty and clever wit. Despite their world’s apart backgrounds, Vera saw Abel’s rough charms and loved hearing his tales of soaring adventure.
After a passionate whirlwind courtship, they married and Abel used his newfound artifact wealth to provide Vera a comfortable life in the underlevels. But his lone wolf tendencies and endless pursuit of the next big score ultimately drove a wedge in their family, culminating in his mysterious vanishing on a black site job years later.
So while Abel’s daring path as an artifact hunter allowed him to woo Vera with tastes of fortune and glory, it may have also been the same compulsions that tore him away from her and their son Kalen forever when he broke a final trust. His ultimate fate and where that obsessive drive took him remains a mystery.