Alia
Name: Alia
Age: 25
Gender: Female
Craft/Rank: Watchrider, Tanner
Appearance: If anyone ever told you that big things come in small packages, they may have been talking about Alia. Her relatively small stature hides considerable strength and energy. She isn't especially short, but hanging around so many tall guys has given her a bit of a 'short complex'. She has an oval face, capped with a loose mass of bronze curls, which she tends to keep back in a ponytail, and whispy bangs that fall over her face. Her hair is just above shoulder height. She has dark tan skin, courtesy of the Igen sun, which has faded only slightly since leaving the desert. Some of her features are childish, such as her wide smile and round cheeks, but others, like her piercing green eyes give her an appearance of sophistication. Her arms and much of the right side of her body are riddled with long dark scars from where she was attacked by a wher two turns previous.
Personality: Passionate, Cool, Tomboyish, Reckless, Confident (read: cocky), Ambitious, Self-assured, Observant, Honest, and Selfless (when it comes to the 'greater good'), Competitive, Workaholic, Insomnic
Alia doesn't seem particularly compassionate at first glance (she's certainly about as rough as you can get) but she goes full tilt into everything and that includes helping people, if asked. It's not certain if she does it out of compassion or ambition, but she's the sort to go above and beyond what it required, working tirelessly on a case until it is done. She can never say no when it comes to work, which can infuriate her friends.
Alia can be as stubbourn as a draybeast sometimes. She may give up an argument for personal or political reasons, but she'll go on thinking she's right until (and sometimes even after) she's been proven wrong.
While often putting herself out there, Alia is pretty resilient emotionally. It was her level of emotional stability that attracted Melangth to her in the first place. She feels negative emotions, of course, but she is good at clearing them from her mind and quickly settles down to an even baseline, and she is not strongly affected by the moods of others.
History: Alia is young and something of an up-start. Born in Igen, she was just another creche-abandoned baby in a busy weyr; her mother was a gold rider who didn't have time for a daughter, she never knew her father. But she was fostered by two lovely tanners, and she couldn't ask for better parents. And she was a difficult child to handle, she knew. From the time she was a toddler, voice still lisping, she had a curiosity that was insatiable. When she couldn't learn what she wanted by asking, she would go and figure it out on her own, getting into all the places children weren't supposed to go to and bothering anyone she could convince to talk to her, until she was known by many around the weyr as a bit of an 'odd child'. Who walked with unanswered confidence, who was a better knife fighter than all of the boys and most of the men, who, from the time she was a weyrbrat in the creche, had maturity and self-assurance well beyond her years. It's the way she used subtle plays of humor to mock and , the way she seemed to get things without being told. Some found it endearing, but most found it unsettling.
Alia did not ever really have any friends. Nor did she ever learn to connect with her own age group. She had companions, with whom she explored the Weyr's tunnels and staged her little mock-battles, but never friends. As she got older, she got into a lot of scraps, often with children up to twice her age. Several times they tried to put her down, and several times they failed, and her cockiness only grew. But eventually, when her confidence overshot her ability, she started to lose. More than once, she'd come come home to her daddies with bruises on her cheek and cuts on her knee. But then she would train, and improve, and started winning again. And the cycle repeated.
Neither of her fathers were dragon riders, but that wouldn't stop Alia from Standing; a small, lithe girl of only twelve, barely able to see the hatchlings over the heads of older candidates. But that didn't stop one of them from seeing her.
And so he did. When Alia impressed Melangth, she was still just a girl. It wasn't surprising that his strong personality dominated hers, for the first few years at least. He taught her everything; how to use her intellegence and control her emotions, how to observe everything around her, and how to predict people's reactions. At first, she idolized Melangth, and listened diligently to everything he told her. However, Alia was a fast learner, and by the time she hit her teens, she was already throwing sass at him, turning his own tricks against him, and going toe-to-toe with him, so that by the time they graduated, it was as equals.
Two turns later, she was a fully-fledge rider who looked younger than most of the Candidates. And she already knew what she wanted to be. With a dragon like Melangth, how could she not? Unfortunately, it was not the policy of the Watch to recruit fourteen year old girls right out of weyrlinghood. So in the meantime, Alia went to work with her fathers. Alia took to her tanning eagerly, not because she was excited to be a tanner, but becuase she was excited to make them happy. But all the while, she continued to work towards her true goal, training and studying on her own.
While, with six years of riding experience and at least four of dedicated training, Alia entered the Watch as a promising young candidate, between her sex, Melangth's color, and the fact they both looked young enough to still be wandering off the Hatching sands, they faced a fair amount of opposition. Alia countered them all by throwing herself entierly into her work. For several turns she worked and got many cases under her belt. She was reckless, but she was young. People were probably hoping it would wear off with age. In the mean time, she had a tendency to get herself into sticky situtions in the course of a case. When she was 22, she was working on a illegal wher-fighting ring and had made friends with a local wher-handler. The two of them were going undercover to unveil the ring leader, but things went a little awry, with one of the wherhandlers catching on to them. When Alia chased him, he set his wher on her. She was saved by the wherhandler she was wroking with, and luckily Melangth had already called the wing and healers.
It wasn't the first time Alia had done something phenomenally reckless (read: stupid), but it was the first time her recklessness had caused her to get this hurt. She spent several months recovering and a full year before she was back in the field, at which point she was transfered into her current wing. Alia was much happier working for J'car. She made close friends with several of her wingmates with whom she is near-inseperable. She's fond of Ai and her spunky gold, so she was happy to join them at Wardens as their 'honor guard' while investigating the prison.
Age 2: Adopted by her foster fathers
Age 12: Impresses Melangth
Age 14: Graduates
Age 18: Joins dragon watch
Age 22: Works wher fighting case, attacked and hospitralized
Age 23: Joins J'car's wing
Other stuff: Alia has a weird love/hate relationship with whers. She likes them in principle, one of them saved her life, but she's a little nervous around them and consciously or subconsciously avoids them, putting other people or large objects between herself and them whenever possible.
While she'll never say she's 'suffering from' it, Alia certainly has insomnia to some degree.
Melangth
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer.
Name: Melangth
Color: Blue
Age: 12
Appearance: Melangth has the brightest, truest, blue-in-blue color you will ever see. He has no real markings, but his color swirls and shimmers like a desert mirage. He is not large or especially muscular, but he knows how to conserve his strength and is built for endurance (large wings, dense muscles, limbs short and close to the body). His movements are always calculated and small, designed to be the most efficient means of getting to an end. As such, he can fly for much longer than is common for his color.
Personality: Fearless, Controlled, Perceptive, Clever, Witty, Loyal, Lawful, Fair, and in control of his emotions.
Melangth is a stoic blue if ever there was one. He faces every problem with an even temper, and wishes his wild Alia would do the same. Even in moments when you'd think he should be most emotional, like during a mating flight or when His is in danger, Melangth is someone even more calm-headed. Fear seems to be something foreign to him, he responds with logic precision to even the most emotional demanding situations.
He can be -and usually is- quite considerate to other dragons. He is polite and (unless given a reason not to be) appropriately respectful to above him in rank. However, it's best not to demand anything from Melangth. His anger can be insited, despite what he will claim and when this happens, he is ruthless and calculated in his revenge. Intimidation is not something that works on this dragon. And he will admit none of it, but Melangth is much more likely to get angry or upset on someone else's behalf than his own.
Melangth is extremely patient. He is happy wherever he can be of use and particularly pleased if he has an opportunity to use his intellengece. He's not the sort to get involved with politics and shares none of his rider's ambition.
