Approved by Con

Name: Bakarn
Age: 18
Gender: Male
Rank: Candidate

Appearance: Bakarn thinks he's a lot handsomer than he is - unless you're really into the shaved-head boot camp cadet look, which he's sported proudly since somewhere around the age of twelve. Let's face it, there are some uniforms that look really stunningly good on a fit young man, and the grey tunic and hose are not one of those uniforms. But that... doesn't really do anything to stop Bakarn cheerfully strolling about like he's the hottest thing to grace the Weyr. If confidence is magnetic, then maybe he's got something going for him.

Sure, there are traces of potential: he's tall, nearly six feet, with a strong jawline and a handsome smile. It's coupled with legs for days and the athletic, leanly muscled build that one gets from good eating and plenty of brisk exercise. Weyrbrats rarely go hungry even at the worst of times. There might be dark hollows under his intensely blue eyes, but they're the result of genetics and bone structure, not from deprivation. His hair is dark seal brown, usually kept as short as possible... if only because the closer it gets to that inch-long maximum limit, the more egregiously unruly it tends to be.

Personality: Let's make this clear: if you told Bakarn that the only way to save his best friend was to put his hand into a wher's mouth and let it bite down, he'd... well, demand proof first. Because contrary to popular belief, he is not that kind of stupid. But he'd do it. He'd ask for a blindfold and a stiff drink, and then he'd do it.

Bakarn is loyal to a fault. No, seriously. It's a fault. Loyalty is a fault when it makes you do stupid things on your friend's behalf, whether that something is hypothetically losing a hand to a wher or very literally picking a fight to defend their reputation. He is willfully blind to the consequences of his actions, provided those actions are performed on behalf of someone else: he'd never put up half so much trouble on his own account, but as soon as you get a friend of his involved he comes down like a sack of hammers. It doesn't help that he has a really unfortunate combination going on: a vicious hatred of all bullies, and an occasionally patronizing tendency to mother-duck over Candidates younger and/or smaller than him. Honestly, you'd think he went around trying to be surrogate-elder-brother-figure to all his fellow creche brats... wait, you mean he more or less does that? That's not a good idea, Bakarn, you should stop doing that.

He's a scrappy motherflyer, quick with his wit and his blade alike, more than a little bit foul-mouthed and audacious to boot. While Bakarn knows how to lie if he has to, they tend to be small lies (of the "I didn't see nothing" when the Candidatemaster asks type) and where it counts he's more likely to be good-naturedly blunt. He calls it "charming honesty". He is deluded on this subject. As one might guess, if you could generate electricity off sheer idiot cockiness, Bakarn on a good day could probably spark a small industrial revolution. His courage is undoubted, though in the right light it can sometimes look more like recklessness. Still, Bakarn doesn't do dangerous things for the sake of the adrenaline rush; he wouldn't have lasted more than a turn as a Second Wing squire if he did. He doesn't enjoy putting himself in life-threatening situations. But he's got a nasty case of big damn hero syndrome, and if that dangerous thing is For The Good of Pern... yep, there he goes. No stopping him now.

It doesn't help that he fancies himself as... something of a ladies' man. And occasionally a man's man. Bakarn doesn't judge. Look, he grew up in a Weyr, he got the birds and the bees talk pretty early because greenflights, and there's... really nothing that shocks him anymore. People like who they like. As for Bakarn, he likes having a pretty companion on his arm. Make no mistake, though, he is a gentleman, not a heartbreaker. It's not about conquest or bragging rights or even getting anything in particular. It's about not being alone. He'd be just as happy to take a girl out on a nice date, walk her back to her weyr, and leave it be. Remember that earlier bit about loyal to a fault? Bakarn doesn't like burning bridges, and his relationships overall tend towards "friends with benefits": low-obligation, companionable bonds that can be just as easily shifted back to just plain "friends" without lingering regrets or ill will. On the rare occasion that he genuinely, romantically, falls for someone, he's more likely to panic and never act on it for fear of somehow ruining everything.

Still, it's important to remember that Bakarn is a teenager. Steadfast belief in his own immortality is the name of the game, here. There is every reason to believe that, as he settles down and matures a little, he has all the potential to become a great rider someday. His motives - courage, selflessness, loyalty - are in the right place. And he's surprisingly good at taking orders, as long as those orders aren't "shut up, Bakarn." Even when he's given a task that he doesn't particularly want to do, there's a difference between a punishment inflicted out of spite and an unpleasant task that's nonetheless for your own good, and Bakarn can tell the difference between the former and the latter. In his own words, he might not be smart but he ain't dumb; Bakarn's intelligence tends towards the emotional rather than the logical, based primarily on intuition rather than learned facts.

He might grumble about it a little, but Bakarn is pretty easygoing about even the onerous aspects of Candidacy. He adores dragonriders of all colors and walks of life. He wants to be a dragonrider, more than anything, and they all have his inherent respect and admiration. As far as he's concerned, the Weyr is his family. They raised him, fed him, and housed him, and everything he does now is repaying them for their kindness.

History: Bakarn is a weyrbrat to the bone. He honestly has no idea who his parents are; he knows his mother was a rider of some chromatic color, but no idea about his father, and there's just too sharding many riders in the Weyr with a B, K, or R in their name. It's not like he could narrow it down, even if he tried. It doesn't bother him overmuch; he has a family, they're just the ones he chose rather than the ones tied by blood.

Point being, he's known dragons since before he could walk properly. The kid grew up immersed in Weyr culture, practically breathing it; it's safe to assume that if it's a common High Reaches attitude, Bakarn has internalized it, at least to some extent. (Some less so than others - he had any sexist ideas thoroughly knocked out of his head by his first squiremaster, but that comes later. Much later.) His entire life, the path before him has been clearly laid out: grow up a weyrbrat, boot camp when he's old enough, squiring, and then a dragon of his own someday. And quite frankly, becoming a dragonrider sounded pretty fardling good, so he never felt the need to question any of it.

As a kid growing up in the creche, Bakarn was... not precisely a ringleader, more like an instigator, within his little posse of friends and fellow conspirators. He was the kid who'd pick up an idea and run with it, rather than let it drop, and bring all his friends along for the ride too. The caretakers largely turned a blind eye, as long as it stayed small and controlled. His adventures usually involved turning the tables on someone who'd been picking on the smaller kids, and the little acts of justice were never enough to get anyone sent to the infirmary. (Although he did get his ears boxed for the Incident in the Laundry that turned half of First Wing's underclothes faintly purple. That wasn't even the intended outcome; they'd mixed up which laundry tub was which.) The rest of the time, he was no particular high achiever in lessons - literacy in particular he struggled with for a few turns, until one of his teachers assigned him to reading that he found interesting enough to want to rise to the challenge.

At age twelve he began boot camp with the rest of the 'brats his age; maybe half a turn later, a new batch of Candidates came in Searched from Nabol, and among them was a scrawny, sickly-looking kid named Seytev. As these things tend to go, almost immediately bets started circulating on how quick it'd take the new kid to wash out and be sent back home. It rankled at Bakarn - such talk always did, because as far as he was concerned, if he was going to pick someone to kick out of Candidacy it'd be the bullies any day.

And then one day someone pushed him a little too far. Seytev stood up to a group of Candidates, each several turns his senior and twice his size. Without even thinking, Bakarn stepped in to back him up. The resultant scuffle left everyone bruised and muttering stubborn excuses to the exasperated healers, and delayed Bakarn's graduation to squiring by several months - they were disappointed in his lack of judgement, the Candidatemaster said. On the other hand, he'd gained a best friend, so there was an upside. Bakarn coached Seytev, helping him catch up to the rest of the class in terms of self-defense, and Seytev in turn helped Bakarn out with the lessons that he tended to tune out.

He was fortunate enough, when he finally graduated boot camp, to catch a position as squire to a Second Wing rider. P'kara was a grizzled, older greenrider, well-used to defending her position amongst the boys; her last squire had just Impressed at Hiraeth's last clutch, and she was looking for (in her own words) a likely-looking Candidate with more heart than brains that she could help knock some sense into. Bakarn fit the bill pretty nicely, overall. Her first focus was on educating him in the realities of rider life: they spouted off a lot of nice platitudes in the classroom, but nobody really told you what it was like to fight bandits (who could be murderous monsters or just desperate people trying not to starve, or both) or how messy the politics could get. Black-and-white, rider supremacist views wouldn't be tolerated under her watch, and she wanted to be sure first and foremost that a little cynicism wasn't going to ruin her bright-eyed and bushy-tailed new squire. It didn't, although it was... a bit of a disappointment, at first, to realize that dragonriders were just people same as everyone else, and that being chosen by a hatchling wouldn't turn the asses in his Candidate class into fundamentally better people.

He was fifteen when she took him into the field for the first time. He was still kept out of the way of the actual fighting, just there to help guard the prisoners once they'd been subdued. If his first glimpse of violence and death up close and personal shook him up, he was too proud and too full of boyish stubbornness to let it show. If he ran back to Seytev afterwards, leaning on his childhood friend for reassurance that the world kept turning, they didn't talk to anyone else about it. And he hardened up quick; the next time, he was prepared enough to grab a blade and rush in after his squiremaster to back her up in a bad situation.

Two turns ago, when Bakarn was sixteen, P'kara's green wheeled left instead of right trying to escape a tight clump of Thread, and winged straight into a bronze's gout of flame. The burns weren't bad enough to kill, but they were... bad. And neither P'kara nor her dragon were young; they wouldn't bounce back from the injury the way that a sprightlier pair would. With great reluctance, the older woman accepted retirement from Second Wing - if her dragon ever flew again, it would not be with the bandit-hunters.

Bakarn was utterly heartbroken. Had she been wounded on the battlefield, he could have rushed in to help, but... without a dragon, there was nothing he could do against Threadfall. He would have gladly stayed with his old mentor, even grounded as she was, but P'kara would hear none of it. It wouldn't do, to have a young man like Bakarn away from the fighting. Still, his sense of loyalty to her wouldn't let him request a transfer, so she took the decision away from him: insisting that she needed her squire out of her hair so that she could spend all her time with her recuperating dragon, she shooed him off to a new squiremaster. And if Bakarn understood the real meaning behind her grumpy farewells, neither of them spoke of it.

He was taken on by C'tis of blue Malcarreth, staying with Second Wing where he already knew the riders and their squires. He knew the stern bluerider by reputation already, and anxious to prove himself, he threw himself with redoubled effort into his work. His combat skills have been improving by leaps and bounds, although lately he's grown uncomfortably aware of how close he's getting to ageing out. One of these hatchings, it's gonna happen...