Name: Firyal
Age: 19
Sex: female
Sexual Orientation: heterosexual
Craft: n/a
Rank: Candidate
Physical Description: Of slightly below average height (five foot five) and above average weight, Firyal can kindly be called curvaceous. Were she a bit thinner around her waist and her legs a bit trimmer or were she but a few inches taller, her height and her weight would be proportionate, but she is not, and so she appears heavyset. Her saving grace in this is that she has impeccable posture and an almost regal bearing which tends to distract people from her diminutive stature and her extra poundage. Her skin is fair, but it is the sort of fair skin that occurs because she has not had much opportunity to be outside. When she is able to be in the sun, she will initially burn, but it will quickly brown. Her eyes have an occidental tilt and are an unremarkable shade of brown and her hair, which she keeps in a braid that goes to the small of her back, is a darker shade of brown.
Personality: Possibly as a result of her poor self-esteem and her desire for others not to notice her flaws, Firyal is one of those people others' eyes tend to skim over despite the fact that she doesn't often go to the effort of making herself unobtrusive. She absolutely despises this trait of hers and blames it for how isolated she often feels, even when in a crowd. She has never wanted to explore the possibility that she may be the source of her own difficulties, though it often occurs to her. One thing that comes about as a result of her "gift" for passing unnoticed is that Firyal is an accomplished and unashamed eavesdropper. She feels it's only fair that she glean information this way, since most of the time no one goes out of their way to see that she's informed and she dislikes being forced to reach out to people.
Firyal likes to think that she's self-sufficient, but as has already been shown she actually has a powerful need to be around people, particularly those who care about her and are willing to remind her of that fact. Part of the problem here is that she is not particularly good at forcing herself to go out and meet new people, and so as her old friends move on she is left feeling increasingly bereft and needy, though she would never admit it. She has improved in this area somewhat, but she still does not enjoy the whole process of making new acquaintances and wishes she could just know them and get to the having a relationship (good or bad) part without all the intervening small talk. This probably relates back to the fact that she is prideful enough to hate making mistakes du to being underinformed.
She's uncomfortable around attractive men her own age, but this is more a result of adolescence and inexperience than anything else. Despite this, she prefers the company of her male friends to that of her female friends, around whom she usually feels fat and unattractive. Her inadequacies are something she feels keenly, though she is not without pride. She just has a rather idiotic notion that her lack of physical beauty translates into a certain worthlessness all around. Her very favorite demographic group (aside from firelizards, who don't quite count), is Cantankerous Old Men. Because she does not feel that her physical attributes (or lack thereof) are at all important in this sort of relationship she is able to relax and give as good as she gets.
Firyal was born into a family of intelligent people and is actually fairly intelligent herself, but she is rarely given the opportunity to demonstrate her intelligence, and so she mostly uses her brain to fantasize as she performs her daily tasks and before she falls asleep at night. In her family creativity and intelligence were valued, but she never seemed to put on a good showing in comparison to the adults that surrounded her. A problem that comes with her intelligence and her imagination, however, is that she has a knack and a habit of imagining potential futures for herself and the longer she's been at the Weyr without Impressing the more dismal and hopeless these futures become and the less faith she's willing to put into her brighter imaginings. This, in turn, has made her into a fairly dark, pessimistic, cynical person, though she may have been that way to begin with. When she was younger she was a very dark person, mood-wise, but as she's got older and realized that her melancholic tendencies were contributing to her difficulties with people she made a concentrated effort to be less so. It was largely unsuccessful because her natural state of being seems to be fairly dark and she has deep-seeded insecurities that relate to being unwanted, inadequate, and easily overlooked. Nevertheless, she does not lack a sense of humor. Her sense of humor just tends toward darkness and dryness.
As mentioned before, Firyal tends to be self-critical, but that tendency doesn't usually extend to others. Much of the time she will try to rationalize a person's behavior or failings, not so much out of the goodness of her heart but more from a sense of fair play and the enjoyment of the intellectual challenge of arguing both sides. She values fairness, though she's cynical enough not to expect it most of the time. She does make an effort to reserve her own judgment in most matters, however, until she's learned more, though she sometimes has instinctive feelings that she tends to trust against almost all reason. One thing she has absolutely no tolerance for is people who are deliberately ignorant and refuse to entertain possibilities.
It was implied before that Firyal is not much good at making herself do things she doesn't want to do. This is pretty much the case. While she is a fairly decent liar due to her intelligence and imagination and has no qualms about turning this ability on herself to convince herself to do things, there are certain things she has never been able to force herself to do. One of these things is lose weight. Another of these things is doing work. She didn't come from a household where a great many chores were assigned to her, and even after seven years of living at the Weyr she doesn't like doing housework-like chores. She does them because the consequences for not doing them aren't worth risking, but she doesn't do them happily or take much pride in her work. She also has a tendency to procrastinate that she's never been able to do much about partly because she gets a secret thrill out of not knowing whether she'll be able to finish in time.
History: Firyal was born in Nerat and raised in a well-appointed though perpetually cluttered house several streets over from the docks. Firyal's father was sent to work in the mines when she was five years old after he tried to kill her mother, who had thrown him out of their home for striking her daughter. Firyal has no memory of this, but she has been told the story so many times over the course of her life that her mind has concocted false memories of the occurrance. She grew up hearing from her family that her father was insane and from her mother that men were untrustworthy, which made it incredibly difficult for her ever to form relationships with young men her own age when she was of an age where she should be doing so. Once puberty hit and she found herself attracted to men, she got even more awkward around them. By the time she was thirteen she had created a rich fantasy life for herself which was much more fulfilling than her real life.
Her mother's parents, as they reached an age where retirement was reasonable, came to live with Firyal and her mother, and that did little to help her relations with anyone in her immediate family. Shortly after their arrival Firyal managed to completely alienate her mother, whose temper was volatile and with whom she had been getting into screaming matches since she was about eight. This eventually resulted in her being sent to live with a cousin as a fosterling at Ista Weyr, where it was assumed she would be kept too busy to fantasize. Her cousin took up with an older Candidate about a year after Firyal arrived at Ista and went home with him, but Firyal opted to stay on at the Weyr, where she had made but a few friends, though more than she'd ever had at home. She was allowed to stand at Hatchings, too, which was a huge influence on her decision to stay.
Seven turns passed since her arrival and though she stood at many Hatchings she never Impressed. She did manage to make a few more friends in this time period, particularly after her eighteenth turn when, for whatever reason, it simply got easier for her to make the first move, though not by much. It never got any easier to stand on the Sands time and again and watch others Impress, despite the fact that she eventually came to possess two firelizards. Firelizards, while delightful, are not dragons. After a Hatching went spectacularly awry and she was mauled by the young queen Firyal decided she couldn't take any more and wrote her mother about coming home. All this was soon accomplished and within a sevenday or so she was back in Nerat.
Pets: Numenor, Chance
Other/Talents: She can sing, but her voice is nowhere near Harper quality, and her range is low enough to be considered contralto. She has an innate talent for being "invisible" and as a result for eavesdropping. She's also a masterful procrastinator and a strong swimmer.
Will this character be a candidate? She doesn't really seem like candidate material to me, honestly, but if you think I could work it, I'd love to try her in that role. (This means yes).
Picture:
Drawn by me.
