Aal Cistler

Aal Cistler was the self-styled "playboy" son of Aldeo Cistler, the leader of the Terran Dominion Treasury Ministry and a personal friend of Arcturus Mengsk. Pushed into the Ghost Academy by a father determined to make something of him, Cistler trained alongside Nova Terra and Gabriel Tosh despite lacking the psionic talent the program demanded, and left a trail of manipulation, drug dealing, and political pressure behind him.

Background#

Over his early life, Cistler spent much of his time getting into trouble, to the frustration of his father. By the age of twenty-four he held three black belts in different martial arts traditions and was relatively well known among the people of the Terran Dominion, but he devoted much of his energy to womanizing. Dissatisfied with his son's lot in life, Aldeo Cistler arranged to have him sent to the Ghost Academy to "make a man out of him," ignoring the requirement that a candidate possess a psionic index of at least 5. Cistler's index was only 4.5.

Director Kevin Bick and Superintendent Sarco Angelini were both unhappy with the arrangement but resolved to make the best of it. They assigned Cistler to Gabriel Tosh's under-strength Team Blue for training, quietly hoping he would slip up and wash out.

Team Blue#

Preceptor Lagdamen introduced Cistler to Tosh, noting his background, lack of commitment, and low psionic index. Cistler brushed off Tosh's greeting and went looking for romantic conquests. In his first training exercise, the team had to navigate a darkened maze by building a shared mental map; Cistler either could not or would not contribute to it, and although his martial-arts skill let him disable combat training robots, he scored only twenty percent. In Sergeant Hartley's martial-arts class he impressed the instructor with his endurance and bested Tosh in a one-minute spar, before Hartley put him on the ground and demanded he follow orders to get back up.

In the lunchroom Cistler met Kath Toom, daughter of a vice president of the Kal-Bryant Mining Conglomerate, and immediately tried to court her; she coolly rebuffed and mocked him. The exchange revealed that teammate Lio Travski's uncle worked at the Conglomerate as a computer technician. Recognizing the signs of hab addiction in Travski, Cistler offered the struggling trainee drugs in exchange for getting his uncle to sabotage the Conglomerate's systems and expose Sector 9. He then provided Travski a high dose of turk disguised as hab, which Travski injected and which eventually left him in a coma.

During a hostage-taking training scenario, Cistler could not project thoughts telepathically to his team and instead paired with the powerful telekinetic Nova Terra, contributing to the team's victory with his martial arts before Terra had to caution him against striking ahead of Tosh's plan. Cistler was washed out for drug trafficking, but rather than being punished he was sent to Korhal through his father's influence. He threatened Mr. Toom on his way out and bragged to Kath Toom that his father's department was investigating hers. Director Bick had all of Cistler's records erased.

Return through Teams Red and Purple#

Not long afterward Cistler returned to plague the Academy. He appeared in a documentary titled I Was Framed, claiming the staff had never given him a fair chance, which the UNN personality E. B. James used to media-ambush Director Bick. Backed by his father and three senators, Cistler forced his way back into the Academy and demanded a place on Team Red, displacing trainee Dori Koogler. There he challenged Kath Toom to a martial-arts match and mockingly beat her, and formed an alliance with Dylanna Okyl, who hated Nova Terra.

When Nova caught the two plotting against her, Cistler promised revenge, and Team Red engineered a training simulation to pin Nova down so Okyl could fight her one-on-one. The plan collapsed when a neurally resocialized and detoxed Lio Travski, returned to Team Blue, used abandoned SCVs to incapacitate Team Red; Cistler tried to bribe him with hab, and Travski responded by punching him in the face. The simulation was halted, and Superintendent Angelini admitted to having used a mild form of neural resocialization on Cistler.

The two teams were then merged into Team Purple for a special training mission aboard the undercrewed, undergunned battlecruiser Cyrus, which had not been refitted since the Battle of Tarsonis a year earlier. Cistler, who had learned through the hypernet that the ship's commander had a reputation for cowardice, told Okyl she relied too heavily on telepathy and that he gathered information by other means. Dispatched to the planet Shi to rescue four Old Family heirs, Cistler and Okyl launched a nuclear missile that Nova Terra guided into a zerg hatchery cluster. The rescue succeeded but left the team sheltering in the crippled Cyrus while the zerg swarmed; Cistler suggested Nova use her psionic potential to draw the swarm away, a tactic that worked and allowed the cluster to be destroyed and the battlecruiser to return for repair. Displeased that the heirs had been rescued, Emperor Arcturus Mengsk ordered the team's memories wiped, and Cistler lost all recollection of the mission, left to believe it had been canceled.