Approved by Tawny
Name: Ellanfer
Age: 36
Gender: Female
Sexual Orientation: Straight
Former/secondary Craft: Smith
Rank: Journeyman
History: Ellanfer was born at Crom Hold, the child of miners and surrounded by miners. It was a relatively uneventful childhood - although the constant parade of rough men around her as a child explains a lot about her demeanor as an adult, really. The casual tomboyish tendencies, the colorful language, the tendency not to be intimidated by older or larger males even when she ought to be... Oh, and a certain fondness for whers. She grew up around the beasts. Ellanfer was climbing all over the more tolerant mining blues and greens when she was way too young to be doing so safely, and it was only due to the whers' good graces that she didn't lose some fingers.
It started off looking like Ellanfer was going to follow the same path. But an ill-timed respiratory illness, perhaps exacerbated by black dust from the mines, delayed the start of her apprenticeship. In the meantime she discovered by accident a remarkable aptitude for the smithcraft. While she was waiting for the local Hold-Harper one afternoon she happened to be listening to a lesson occurring next door, then sidled in to ask the teaching Journeyman some questions and showed herself to be paying more attention than any of the actual apprentices there. Soon enough she was helping the smiths, working the ore and metal that the miners hauled out of the earth.
Apart from that, it was a peaceful period in her life. Very little of interest happened to her. She didn't tragically lose any family members, no one was murdered or accused of any significant crimes, no Holdless bandits showed up to threaten her livelihood or her honor... Mostly she made do with listening to torrid Harper-tales about that sort of thing instead. When she was around eighteen or so, her family started thoughtfully suggesting matches to her with various eligible males around her age, as she had yet to start settling down properly as a young lady ought to. Ellanfer equally thoughtfully considered them and then noped the heck out of each and every one. This didn't stop her from fancying men, mind, or from having a discreet relationship with a fellow smith three turns later. She just had no interest in getting married, and there was a world of difference between finding a friendly bedmate and tying yourself inevitably to some boring local lad for the rest of your life.
This didn't go over so well with the smith she was discreetly "spending late nights working" with. He ended up breaking it off when Lan told him no, she's not going to marry him, and no, she doesn't want to bear children for him either. Instead she walked the tables and continued being spectacular at smithing and making some of her male coworkers uncomfortable about the adorable little lady who kept coming in and critiquing their technique.
A brutal cave-in when Lan was in her late twenties killed quite a few local miners; no one in her immediate family, but a few family friends, and enough to shake her out of her comfortable status quo. She was badly shaken by the incident, and quietly urged the remaining miners in her family to retire with the marks from her own smithing income.
Not long after tensions began rising between Benden and the other weyrs, she met a visiting rider under... less than ideal conditions. She ran afoul of a half-starved, feral wher that had dared wander too close to civilization in search of prey, being able to smell the meat that the miners' whers feasted on. The wher attacked her. A dragon intervened. Lan insisted that she would have done quite fine calling the local handlers to help her out, and that the interference of an enormous sharding dragon only made the situation worse, not better. However, she only insisted this after the fact - well after the fact - because one doesn't take a wher to the face with impunity, and Lan wasn't exactly conscious to argue with the rider when he took her back to the weyr with him to save her life.
It was a stupid thing to do. He should have left her with Crom's healers, not taken her all the way back to Benden, and she chewed him out right proper for it. The damage, exacerbated by going between, left her with some scarring (which fortunately got better) and a ruined eye (which did not). But a man could be forgiven for panicking when confronted with a bleeding, potentially-dying lady, and taking her on instinct to the place that he knew best. By the time she fully recovered from the fellis-haze, she was at least willing to grudgingly admit that she owed him her life, even if he owed her an eye. And she liked his dragon, a lovely good-natured blue Searchdragon, even if she was far too old to be a Candidate. Lan opted to stick around the weyr for a while, because she didn't really feel up to traveling by herself right after losing a major sensory organ. Besides, a weyr always needs smiths. She could still send whatever spare marks she made back to the Hold for her family.
While she was at Benden, she remained friends with the bluerider who'd brought her to the weyr to begin with, but simply by natural inclination she began to hang out with the local wherhandlers as well. She gravitated to them as a relative constant in a different world: the Weyr was vastly different from her home Hold, but whers were whers were whers. In particular, she took on a surprisingly close relationship with a brownhandler named Norton. Norton was, in many respects, an a** - confident, outspoken, assertive to the point of being nearly obnoxious, and proud of his generations of wherhandling heritage. His wher was a handsome, expensive beast - a pinnacle of selective breeding, and Norton knew it. But when he wasn't picking fights due to his own arrogance, he was... surprisingly sweet, even charming. He was kind and generous and gracious with her. And possessive over his romantic partners, a trait that the chronically libertine dragonriders rarely shared, and one that Lan found oddly flattering. It was sweet to have a man willing to defend her honor, even if she didn't feel like she needed defending. At the same time, the bluerider continued to play hangdog after her, hoping that she'd change her mind and ditch Norton in favor of him.
Then... the revolution. It came on suddenly. Ellanfer had just finished talking to one of the local goldhandlers about the possibility of becoming a wher candidate. She was aware of the increased tensions brewing between wherhandlers and dragonriders - her friends on either side had nearly come to blows on several occasions, with Ellanfer only just barely maintaining neutrality. When the revolution arrived, suddenly she wasn't able to just remain neutral anymore. All she wanted was to find Norton in the chaos - to try and understand what was happening, and then hunker down somewhere safe until it was over.
She found Norton with a crossbow bolt through his head, and her Searchrider friend standing over him.
Norsk, normally a docile and sensible creature, went half-mad with the loss of his handler and hurled himself upon the bluerider. Ellanfer couldn't think, could barely comprehend what she was seeing - but she knew she didn't want to watch a man disemboweled by a wher right in front of her. Acting on a spur of the moment impulse, she called to Norsk and pulled him back, her voice just familiar enough to the enraged brown to make him stop mauling the bluerider. He turned teeth onto Ellanfer, but not to kill - just drawing blood, shallowly. Re-blooding.
He was Ellansk. The bond was... unconventional, forged in the fires of revolution and blood and mutual grief. Ellanfer was not prepared for wherlinghood, but Ellansk wasn't an infant wher. It was a bewildering new world that she was thrust into, but ultimately she opted to stay at Benden; she needed mentors who could teach her how to care for her new bonded, and after seeing her friend standing over the dead body of her lover... Well. She wasn't exactly prepared to be kind and trusting towards dragonriders. And Trine wasn't exactly accepting wherhandlers with open arms.
Description: Ellanfer used to be genuinely pretty. Then she lost an eye and chopped off all her hair and now she hangs out with the wherhandlers. She's still pretty, of course, but only if that's the sort of thing you're into.
She's relatively short and slight of build, albeit with some rather noticeable curves, but not a lot of sheer mass. (Especially compared to a lot of the big muscular wherhandlers around.) Lan just isn't the sort of person you envision as handling a wher like Ellansk, and at only five foot four she can easily sit on his back without much difficulty. While she doesn't have the muscle mass to hold her own in a challenge of brute force - she's just not one of the sorts of ladies who's built for linebacker shoulders - Lan has all the dexterity and steady hands one would expect of a journeyman smith. She's really, really good with a crossbow or a throwing knife, and generally keeps one or the other close at hand.
Ellanfer has jet-black hair, boyishly short and tousled around features that can't be mistaken for anything but feminine. The light tan of her skin is interrupted by a spray of faint freckles across her nose and cheeks, further reinforcing the illusion that she's younger than she is - Lan could be mistaken for twenties, despite being thirty-six turns old. Really, though, the most striking thing that most people will remember is the eyepatch. The wound was clean enough that there's not visible scars around the patch. (Thank Faranth for little blessings.) She wears the serviceable, plain leather patch so that no one will be creeped out by the socket underneath - her eye is actually gone, not just blinded. The remaining one is a very dark shade of green.
Personality: A ball of kindness and hope with a lot of justifiable anger wrapped around it, Ellanfer is the kind of person who could have turned out much better than she did if the world didn't keep dealing her a bad hand. Things have gone really very poorly for her lately, and she is justifiably angry at the entirety of the Weyr. As far as she's concerned they all owe her an eye.
Ellanfer is the voice of reason and the eternal optimist, the one who doesn't give up and doesn't break down even when it seems like everything's gone FUBAR. She could be trapped in a burning building and she'd spend her last words telling you to run, she'll be fine, she'll catch up. And then she would. Somehow. Hers isn't the bubbly or gregarious kind of optimism. Especially lately, she's angry more often than she's cheerful. But the important thing to note is that she's never despairing. Ell simply doesn't know how to give up on things. She'll get upset and she'll cuss a lot and then she'll settle down and make herself focus on fixing things.
Speaking of fixing things... Lan's good at that, too. She was a really fantastic smith for a while. She has strong engineer tendencies, with a critical eye and a tendency to discreetly optimize any complex implements she's got the opportunity to attack with her bag of smith's tools. In the company of her fellow smiths, she banters enthusiastically with other engineers over silly minutiae whenever she gets the chance.
Physically and emotionally affectionate with others, Lan forms strong attachments to people very quickly and doesn't like to be alone. As a result, she will sometimes choose the nearest person at hand to stick close to rather than wait for a better option. This doesn't mean she won't leave a relationship when it starts going south - but she'll stick around longer than might be strictly healthy, until she's forced to step back and realize what she's gotten herself into. Perhaps it's tied into her sense of optimism: Ellanfer sees the best in people, not the worst, and thus she'll try to drag someone out of the dark rather than simply leave them. Still, with recent events, Lan has some trust issues, and she's much less likely to readily accept people than she used to be. At the very least they'll have to prove themselves to be on her side before she's willing to drop her guard.
She's very attuned to the emotions of others, although she doesn't let them affect her so much that her judgement is easily impaired. Still, it can be both a strength and a weakness: she's a good person to choose to try to calm or comfort someone in crisis, but given her option she will generally prioritize people over principles or mission success. Even if in the long run the success of a mission would be more valuable to the Hold than bringing everyone back alive, she'd be conflicted about it, at the very least - and in some ways, being conflicted can be worse than having strong convictions one way or the other. At least if you have your convictions you'll be able to make a snap decision. At the end of the day, Ellanfer wouldn't be the one to sacrifice anyone except herself for the fate of the world, and she'd rather not be in charge primarily because that means someone else gets to make the final call. Let those with harder hearts endure the cruel calculus of war.
Other: n/a
Wher
Name: Ellansk
Age: 25
Colour: Brown
Description: Ellansk is a genuinely good-looking wher. As in, almost shaped like a miniature dragon good-looking. He's big for a brown, five feet even at the shoulder, with a long neck and tail and large wings for his species. His hide is smooth for a wher, lying tight and flat over sharp, conditioned musculature. There isn't an ounce of spare fat on Ellansk's body. His head is refined, delicate, wedge-shaped with a certain sharpness to it reminiscent of a dragon, with large nostrils. Paired with a deep chest, this gives him remarkable stamina; Ellansk can run for hours. This is somewhat testament to his breeding: he comes from impeccable breeding, stock that has served Lord Holders, Masterminers, and Wherleaders for generations.
His hide is pure, glossy creamy brown, marbled faintly with darker chocolate and sandy brindling. Ellansk is a striking and easily recognizable beast; unusually pale for a brown, he's not the kind of brown wher that could easily be mistook for another. In particular, Ellansk is regularly seen bearing a simple modified saddle. Ellanfer dislikes riding runnerbeasts - why would you put a saddle on something that can spook and throw you when there's a perfectly serviceable brown wher around? And Ellansk certainly doesn't seem to mind her weight.
Personality: Ellansk solves practical problems.
For instance, how is Ellansk going to stop some big mean dragonrider from tearin' him or His a structurally superfluous new behind? With teeth. Lots of teeth. And if that doesn't work? Well, add more teeth.
Don't let the fact that he can be flat out aggressive in a fight fool you: Ellansk is bright. Very bright. Like, holy crap how did a wher get this smart bright. He's a strategist with an eye for battlefields, and the fact that his handler isn't generally intended for combat hasn't seemed to stop that yet. It just means that if he's not going to be much help in the thick of things, he'll be around back, helping His set up traps or guard choke points or any of the vast numbers of interesting things that smiths-turned-wherhandlers can get up to in dangerous situations.
He's surprisingly easygoing when he's not in a fight, though. He's interested in how things work, and why things work, and Ellanfer's brain is a wealth of interesting information. He likes building things. He wishes whers had more digits on their front feet, so he could build things. Honestly, Wind Blossom really didn't think this thing through at all. He likes music (has a special fondness for a good Harper gitar) and cards, and tends to spend most of his downtime sitting down with a good bone to crack open and watching Ellanfer do whatever it is she does. He's generally quite polite to others, both human and wher, and doesn't always get the whole 'aggression' and 'fighting' thing. That's a lot of effort, Ellansk is pretty okay staying out of the worst of it.
He can be a little patronizing, especially for people who aren't expecting a wher to calmly eye whatever it is they're working on and then coolly remark that it might be better if you took it apart and started all over. But Ellansk isn't a rude or sarcastic wher, he just wants to help. Unfortunately, having Ellanfer in his head and his own smarts on the matter means that he's surprisingly good at seeing when something won't work. He's pretty devoted to his own ideas, or any ideas that he comes up with through Ellanfer, and can be a little protective of them. He doesn't like sharing, and he's a bit proud - asking for help is pretty beyond him. Unless it's Ellanfer. He bugs Ellanfer a lot, because she has thumbs.
Interestingly, he doesn't cuss. Ellanfer cusses. Ellansk doesn't. Ellansk thinks the entire wealth of Pernese oaths is plenty strong for him, and quietly believes that resorting to cusses is the mark of an overemotional or petty mind. Ellanfer excepted, of course, though if she cleaned up her language, she'd certainly be a much more desirable little lady, and thus a much better catch.
Other: Formerly known as Norsk.
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