Character Name: Malina

Age: 16

Sexual Orientation: Straight

Craft/Rank: Apprentice Healer

History: To Malina, her parents are mysterious figures found only in her grandpapa’s stories. Her mother was a seacrafter, and her father was a dolphineer. They were quite a happy pair, despite their intensive, engrossing jobs, and tended to leave their baby girl with her maternal grandparents. One Turn when they were out at sea together, there was a particularly bad squall, and they did not return to retrieve her as usual. She was really too young to be deeply affected by their loss, and having been raised to consider her grandpapa and grandmama as her parents, it never truly sunk in.

On her grandpapa’s knee, she heard stories about her mama and papa, generally tales of their bravery and exploits... as though seacrafters and dolphineers constantly fought valiant battles with the sea. They were of course greatly exaggerated-- her grandpapa as a retired Harper added quite a bit of flair to any story he told. Still, the wonderment of being one half of a dolphin pair caught at her imagination, as well as the idea of maybe one day having her own ship to sail the seas of Pern.

As Malina grew, her grandparents saw more and more of their lost daughter in her, but she far more resembled her father. It became painful for them to even speak of those old tales, and one day the stories finally stopped. It was then time for Malina to choose a craft of her own to follow, and in the end she chose neither of her parents’ crafts, as both demanded that she spend time in the ocean. There was not a lot of pressure put on her to avoid it, but she was not oblivious to her grandparents’ fears. They had already lost their only child to the ocean, and did not want it to claim their grandchild.

So instead Malina decided to become a healer, and the idea was met with a great deal of enthusiasm. For the first couple of Turns, it went very well, and the young woman learned quite a bit about the theory of healing. When she had progressed to the practical side of things, however, she met with some trouble. She had some hope of being stationed nearby when she completed her training... but that was before she discovered just how very ill suited to being a healer she actually was.

As it turns out, small traits that separately seemed innocuous became a general clumsiness and unsteady hands that probably weren’t best suited to delicate materials. Tasks that required better than average dexterity, such as sewing up a wound were rather poorly suited to the young woman, whose hands shook with excitement. She had never noticed these things before.

Perhaps they had not been so prevalent, because she had never been so excited as she was now, with something new to learn, and people who were not her grandparents to impress-- and in this case, fail to impress. Malina was a good student, but on the whole rather unsuited to her chosen craft. Discouraged, she tried to think of what she could do to help out, if not the tasks she had been set to. In the end, it was all a moot point.

She’d been sent out to fetch fresh linens for her craftmaster, and was in the process of brooding about her predicament when she actually ran full into a dragonrider. Stumbling through her apologies, the girl tried to slink away to complete her task... and was greeted with a new and surprisingly possibility. The rider was on Search, and her dragon had informed her that Malina might very well be a suitable Candidate. Malina greeted this news with her usual excitement, and some amount of trepidation.

It would mean leaving her grandparents behind, something which she had managed to avoid doing even as an Apprentice Healer. However, there was also the potential to become a hero like her greatly exaggerated parents had been. Her head was full of tales of victory and glory, of triumph over felines and the various other dangers of the Southern Continent, and Thread, while not listed among them specifically, had to be at least as deadly. After a (relatively) brief consultation with her grandparents, she determined that she was ready to go with the Searchrider.

Description: At first glance, Malina’s facial features are somewhat obscured by a head of riotous black curls that end at about the small of her back. Sometimes she chooses to wear her hair in a braid, though she’s not... terribly good at it, and ends up looking pretty ridiculous half the time. She is about as tanned as you might expect from a young woman born and bred in the Southern Continent. Her eyes are as black as her hair, and framed by similarly dark lashes, and strong eyebrows. She’s small, and petite, and still somewhat knobbly kneed. Said knees are often skinned, and whatever breeches or skirts she wears show the marks of that.

Personality: Malina is a very excitable young woman, and deeply passionate. She greets live with a particular verve and enthusiasm that carries over in her gestures and manner of speech. When she’s worked up, she gesticulates wildly, to the point where if she’s particularly excited, she may even lose her balance. Not that there is a lot of that for her to lose, anyway. She has been rather sheltered in her life, and so encounters quite a number of surprises almost daily in the Weyr.These are normal things, of course, but are met with a befuddled fascination in the young Candidate.

New and interesting things only further feed that tendency toward passion, and she now spends a good deal of her time simply in awe of the Weyr and its inhabitants. Before she was found on Search, she only encountered dragons from a distance, and they are greeted with an almost worshipful curiosity. No doubt she will eventually learn that dragons and riders are just as flawed as people (in the case of riders very literally), but until then expect to be under keen observation if you fall into one of the above categories.

She would very dearly like to make friends, but she is a little hamhanded at it, and her manners could use some work. She isn’t shy, but she is reserved, because she doesn’t quite know how to approach this business of making friends and moving through circles larger than those of the seahold that she hails from. Once she gets going, however, it is hard to stop her. She may, in fact, say too much, caught up in the aforementioned passion. Slow to start, but even slower to finish, she had no compunction against talking anyone’s ear off.

Malina hasn’t quite grown out of the “teehee boys!” stage yet, and is prone to flustering around them. She has quite a bit of trouble concentrating around the sheer excitement (yes, she is very excitable) of having members of the opposite sex of her very own age present and accounted for. She can be exceptionally clingy, having spent the fast majority of her life with two people who were constantly in attendance of her, and requires as much validation as you might expect from a sixteen Turn old girl.

She is a somewhat flighty worker, prone to becoming distracted by the latest shiny thing, and needs someone to keep her mind on the job at hand. Her imagination is a powerful thing, fed by tales of her larger than life parents, and every time she retells a story, it seems to have grown in size! She can’t really account for that, but it is obvious that the feline her father saw from a distance was really actually a feline that he bravely fought off. After all, isn’t that how her grandpapa tells it? Of course it is.

This tale spinning tendency has gotten somewhat out of control, as it has made its way into her ordinary life. Everything that happens must be so much more dramatic than it was when it first happened, of course. If you ask Malina what she did yesterday, you might get a different answer every time. She doesn’t really mean to lie about things, but she habitually exaggerates them, to the point where they little resemble actual reality.

Other: She’s a reasonably good swimmer?