Dr. Mest Kölleg

Kölleg, skeptical of almost everything

Dr. Mest Kölleg is the Argo's Junior Psychiatrist on staff. Her responsibilities are to help evaluate Nemean and Chimera Strike Force staff, fill out prescriptions for psychoactive medication and make sure staff are taking their medications responsibly. Kölleg also doubles as a psychotherapist and can take part in several behavioral interventions with staff.

## Background

### Early Years and Education

Mest Kölleg was born in the Duchy of Savanti to a pair of Atlan refugees, with the birth name of Marla Konner. Her parents were deported just months after her birth, but because she was born in Savanti, she was a naturalized citizen and could not be deported. So the newborn was slotted into the Savanti orphanage program in the large metropolitan city of Dunarese (Duh-nar-ess). With her initials of "M.K." on her birth certificate, she was temporarily renamed "Mest Kölleg" after a famous Savanti musician of baroque origin and the name was never changed.

Unlike other more common federal orphanage systems in other countries, where orphanages are funded by taxpayer money, Savanti orphanages are funded by the works of the orphans themselves after their stay. All orphans within the Savanti system are required to spend at least 1 year in indentured servitude, 2 years in public community service and 3 years in a military setting after the age of 18 where they are released into the world.

Life in the orphanage was hard on Kölleg, as she was smaller and more prone to bullying than the other kids in the system. She was passed from orphanage to orphanage frequently. The only two things that were ever constant in her multiple stays was the fact that she was always within the Dunarese metropolitan area and that a social worker named Damen Nueregh was always treating her. It's believed that Kölleg and Damen were close friends through her childhood and that Damen was a large influence in her decision later to become a therapist.

This friendship between the two strengthened the more Kölleg isolated herself from other children in the orphanage system, and at 17 Damen decided to take Kölleg on as an academic adviser when she enrolled in a local community college Damen worked at after passing a GED. Kölleg decided to enroll in a Master's program and fastballed through it with remarkable scores, passing her undergraduate master's degree in just 3 years and her graduate studies as a PHD in 2, becoming one of the most youngest doctorate students to graduate in Savanti history at age 22.

### Public Service

Despite nation wide pride and recognition for her accomplishments in the intellectual field, her public service came back to haunt her. On January 1st, just two months after her graduation, the government of Savanti filed a suit against her, stating that she had failed to perform her "1-2-3" years of orphan service and that she either had to retroactively serve those 6 years out, pay a massive fine that had an incorporated cumulative interest that would forever tie her to poverty or spend 3 years in prison. Kölleg opted for the first option, taking first her indentured servitude under the service of a Savanti metallurgy plant. It was dangerous work, even through she was not an actual factory worker but rather a health manager, and while inspecting one of the "ironclad" smelting furnaces, a cooling fan was unintentionally activated and cut off the pinky and ring finger of her right hand and beheaded her partner. Now she has a prosthetic pair of fingers, which can be seen in the picture. She would attend multiple therapy sessions afterwords about witnessing the death of her co-worker in the cooling fan mechanism, and afterwords she would regard this moment as "the worst year" of her "relatively short life"

For her two years of public service, Kölleg opted to take part as a postal worker in a remote hilly outpost on Savanti foothills. Her service here was rather devoid of any notable events in her life, and she would later say that it was "breathtakingly dull". During her service, she would spend her off times when they came by studying her field of psychology further and finishing a minor in psycho-therapy.

### Recruitment

After her 3 years in the "1-2-3" program, Kölleg filed a motion to the Savanti court system, stating that she was no use in any military setting and requested that her remarkable academic career exempted her from the 3 years of required military service. The Savanti court system denied her this, stating they could not make exceptions here and risk creating a legal precedent for denying many orphans from a mandatory 3 year military service.

In response, Kölleg fled the country entirely to the Ambrosian Republic where she pleaded the Ambrosian authorities for asylum, which they granted. Normally the Duchy of Savanti would not have acted over one measly orphan dropping their entire life and fleeing to another country. However news of her accomplishments were still somewhat circling, as well as her sudden fleeing of Savanti. She soon became a poster-child of Savanti legal flaws and court based injustices within the Duchy of Savanti's bureaucratic system. Desperate to see her punished in a legal setting to quell potential discontent, the Duchy of Savanti filed for her to be expedited back to the Duchy of Savanti.

What followed was two years of international legal bickering between the Duchy of Savanti and the Ambrosian Republic on Kölleg's status as a political expedite. During which time Kölleg spent much of her time confined to the Ambrosian embassy in the capital. During her downtime she offered her services as councilor for a number of refugees entering the republic. Eventually the Union military, representing Kölleg's legal defense, and the Duchy of Savanti reached an agreement. Kölleg would return to the Duchy of Savanti and serve her 3 terms military service ONLY if those three years were spent on the Union JSF teams as a noncombatant psychiatrist and Savanti representative. Kölleg accepted and she has spent the last year on board the Argo now as JSF psychiatrist and therapist.