Name: Tanda
Age: 24
Gender: female
Orientation: heterosexual
Rank and Craft: creche worker

History: Raised completely by her mother, Tanda grew up very differently from her brother, since her father was utterly uninterested in his female offspring. He couldn't even be bothered to suggest names for her or her older sister, Ylabet, which is why they are so different-sounding from Bashir's. Tanda never minded her father's marked disfavoritism. She adores her younger brother, who was six turns her junior and a perfect age for her to dote on him. She played mother to him as often as she was allowed from the moment he was born.

As she got older and it became apparent that Bashir was not going to be allowed to be her pretend-child, Tanda made quick friends with the other children in the Weyr and grew up perfectly normal. Her mother was not much of a role model, allowing herself to be pushed around by her husband, but by the time Tanda was old enough to realize this wasn't really the norm Tanda had come to think of her father more as a man who happened to live with them, rather than as her father. Sometimes she resented him for it, but not to the degree Ylabet did.

Her older sister, only two turns her senior, left the Weyr with a trading caravan when Tanda was sixteen, bidding them all good riddance. It nearly broke their mother's heart, and so Tanda devoted herself to being a good daughter to make up for her sister's abandonment. By this time, she was already helping in the creche and she had decided that she wanted to be a mother. People needed to be cared for, and she liked to feel needed. She had also discovered sex, which was something she decided she liked well enough, though she hardly became a sex-addict, despite her goal of having children.

Physical Description: Short and slim, without any muscle tone, Tanda looks like many other workers in the lower caverns. There is strength in her arms from hauling heavier things, but she doesn't fling them about without difficulty. Lifting heavy objects is work for her, and usually she's sore afterward - so no children over five turns. Like her father, grandfather, and siblings, Tanda has very dark brown hair and eyes, and her skin is darker than the average High Reaches dweller. Also like the rest of her family, she has an aquiline nose and heavy eyebrows that she actually bothers to shape, rather than allow them to grow thick and unruly. Her hands are surprisingly soft because she takes care to keep them that way. Tanda cares about her appearance. She dresses conservatively, but in cuts and colors that flatter her.

Personality: Tanda is nurturing. That's probably her most obvious trait. She adores children right up until they hit puberty. And even then, she adores them no less, but differently. She knows they don't need her kind of care anymore, and so she switches from mother-mode to confidante-mode. If necessary. She always prefers that children are able to leave her care without needing her at all afterward. It makes her feel that she's accomplished her goal, which is to instill in them appropriate values and help them discover their own self-worth.

What Tanda wants more than anything else in the world is to be a mother. Perhaps because of her father's utter lack of interest in her and her mother's passive acceptance of Musil's casual neglectfulness, Tanda isn't particularly interested in marriage. She's seen that it doesn't necessarily indicate conjugal bliss that more illicit relationships seem to have. And from the profusion of weyrbrats that she cares for, Tanda knows marriage is not a requirement for childbearing. Thus, when she is not among her youthful charges, Tanda is a completely different person. She is the sort of woman who doesn't mind being a rider's stand-in during mating flights and is always a willing partner. In short, she's a bit of a floozy. But she's a very circumspect floozy - she doesn't want her charges to get the wrong idea about her.

When her mind is not occupied with thoughts of children and childbearing, Tanda is a reasonably intelligent young woman. Spared the ultra-conservative dogma her brother was subjected to, she grew up far more open-minded and very aware of how capable women could be. Her own mother isn't much of an example for the strength of women, but Tanda always had plenty of other people she could look to. The female blue- and greenriders, and especially the rare female brownriders. True, most of them are bisexual, if not homosexual, but that wasn't who they are, it was just who they're attracted to. Tanda is very firmly interested in men, since they're the only way to produce children.

Other: Tanda has never stood for a hatching. Her father would not permit it.