Meera
Name: Meera
Age: 30
Gender: Female
Prisoner: Nope!
Crime:
Candidate: Yes. biggrin
Former Craft/Rank: Beastcrafter (apprentice)
Appearance:
Meera is exactly what you get if you take a person and hammer them out on the anvil of life. Well, no, not really. I just thought that would be poetic. Anyway, she is a rather thin sort of person. Not skinny, exactly. She's more wiry, the sort that means muscles are strung along her limbs like beads on a wire. And she does have muscles. She is every inch a guard. In fact, she has to borrow a few inches off of someone else, since she doesn't have many for herself. She's 5'5''.
Like most occupants of the Southern Continent, she's dark skinned. It's not the kind of dark that comes with a tan either. Her hair is dark, thick, and curly. She prefers to keep it cut short, just beyond her ears, because keeping it longer is a hassle. Also, long hair is a handy grip for when you're fighting with someone. She'd rather not just hand someone a weapon.
She's not exactly pretty. She's more handsome than pretty. Her sharp features are just a bit too sharp to be truly 'pretty'. But she does have lovely eyes; they're a bit large for her angular face and are a deep brown.
Personality:
Meera has taken personal offense at the world. Mainly, she's taken personal offense because the world isn't doing things right. When she was tiny, she was raised with the ideas of truth, justice, and honor. Theeeen she realized that all those things were rather bunk.
Clearly, the world was wrong. Well, at least on some things. After a few fights, Meera quickly decided that 'honor' certainly had no place in that specific part of the world. If she must fight (and she's got a bit of a temper, so she absolutely will), she will fight hard and dirty and, above all else, to win. The point of a fight is to get the other person down on the ground as soon as possible. It's not to win points or something like that.
She is an extremely loyal person. On the bright side, this means she will stick by a friend throughout anything. On the downside, it means that if you try and convince her that, say, a friend is actually stealing from her, she will cover her ears and go LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU. Metaphorically speaking. Probably.
The people who are in charge are in charge for a reason, she feels. A hierarchy is necessary for order and she stands by it. She has no time for all of this shiny business, though. Since she wasn't raised in a Weyr, she finds it all a bit odd that hide color should mean so much.
Stubborn. Have I mentioned that? Changing Meera's mind is like trying to rip a stump out of the yard. Necessary in some cases but, in others, it's probably not worth it. Just work around the proverbial stump. It'll probably save time. She's also a very determined person. Acutely aware of being a woman in a man's world, she is decidedly prickly about any comments (or perceived comments). She is absolutely determined to crawl up through the command, because she thinks the best chance she's got at changing the way the world works lies there.
She does care. Really, she does. It's just that caring in this world is like being a cow in a pond of piranhas. Sooner or later, they'll strip the poor thing to its bones. She's learned to deal with the way the world is by developing a layer of snark, like so many other people. Most of her soft spots are reserved for the animals she occasionally cares for. A careful observer might notice her cuddling Lucky. A cautious observer might want to forget.
Dancing is a not-so-secret love of hers. Really, she misses Gathers. But you can't really have Gathers in prisons.
History:
(Family info goes here! She's got an older brother and a younger sister, plus both parents. All living)
Meera was born in Southern Hold. It wasn't exactly the best neighborhood, but her parents did their best to at least try to shield their children from the realities all around them. It was the sort of neighborhood where, if you took a trip down an alley, the best thing you'd see would be a man taking a leak (and hopefully from the regular place and not due to a severe case of stabbing).
In some distinct ways, Meera had to grow up fast. In other even more distinct ways, she didn't. For example, people generally get to the stage where they realize that 'truth' and 'justice' are simply words (and expensive ones at that). Meera still hasn't gotten to that stage.
It probably started in Southern. She took one look at the world around her and declared that it was broken. More than that, she was filled with the desire to fix it. Her parents hoped that she'd become a smithcrafter like her dad (perhaps a farrier; she had the right build for it, after all), but instead they had a copper on their hands, years before the word was even known.
Meera did her best to help. She really did. She tried. Whenever she heard about some abusive man hitting his wife, she'd do her best to get the woman and kids out. She tried to help dusters get clean. She did her best.
But, eventually, she realized that it was like spitting at the rain. Abused wives went back. Dusters went back to nursing their drugs. The sheer stress of trying to look after everything started to wear down on Meera.
At 20, she ran away to the countryside and decided to raise sheep. How complicated could it be? Sheep were sheep. They were known for not being clever. They were honest in ways people couldn't, because they couldn't come up with lies.
They were also incredibly dull.
Six years after starting her apprenticeship, Meera heard about the development of Warden's. That old fire, never completely dampened, roared back into life. She went to sign up almost immediately.
She's been there ever since.
Other stuff: She has a pet lamb named Lucky.
Lucky is absolutely not an abyssal horror from beyond the worlds we know.
He does not sing the song of a thousand dead worlds on late nights.
He's just a lamb.
He does, however, headbutt people.
I don't know how these rumors get started...
Anyway, Meera got Lucky when his mother died (she was an old ewe; no one expected her to conceive). Meera's been raising Lucky ever since. He's roughly two weeks old. He most closely resembles a merino sheep.
