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Name: L'ssa (formerly Lissari)
Age: 35
Gender: Female
Rank: Wingrider (Wing 3-1, pending permission)
Appearance: L'ssa is a hard woman, built with strong shoulders and powerful arms. Standing at 5'6", she only towers over a select few, but nevertheless maintains a commanding presence with confident posture and a wry expression that is never up to any good. Her hair is shaved at the sides, but spills down from the top of her head in long black waves, held out of her face by a headband when necessary. Her skin is olive-toned, weathered, and well-scarred, with a distinctive burn scar on her right arm and shoulder from Threadfall. L'ssa's face is sharp and angular, with a downturned nose and lilted hazel eyes atop high cheekbones and a thin set of coyly curved lips. She carries herself like a predator in its home environment, and dresses to reinforce the image with a mixture of practically designed riding leathers with a splash of the exotic or exquisite, such as a vibrant hip-sash or a woven gold armband. With Gathers come the more extravagant clothing choices, but L'ssa is sure to always keep at least some functional riding gear incorporated into her outfit, no matter the occasion, and anything that absolutely can't be repurposed for flying is a no-go.
Personality: Look out kids, the biggest ego this side of High Reaches is prowling this way! L'ssa is a brash talker, a wave maker, and an all-out flirt, making her presence known since she first arrived as a candidate many turns ago. Her sense of humor is sophomoric, and it's never uncommon to hear the rough bark of her laughter echoing in the dining hall. Personal space is a thing that just doesn't exist for L'ssa, and she's quick to express her current mood with gestures or even touches (though over the years she's learned to respect distance for those who ask it). While being largely obtuse in personality, she is surprisingly non-violent, and is slow to turn to physical aggression in a confrontation. She'll certainly talk a big game, though, and isn't above resorting to taunts or jeers to try and force down the opposition with the sheer power of peer pressure. If all else fails, she will shrug someone off as simply not worth her time, and then its back to whatever joke she was telling the kitchen woman.
Her bravado isn't all talk, though: L'ssa is well known for putting in the extra little bit of effort where it counts, and when she's determined to a cause, she's even run herself to exhaustion a good number of times. Her focus is powerful, but on extreme blinders, and she tends to get so caught up on one task at a time that the others slack (but did you see how well oiled Caldweth's harness is?). Additionally, what she chooses to put her efforts towards is picked seemingly at random, and her priorities seem to have no real consistency from one turn to the next. While she's fantastic at making elaborate and stalwart promises, she's not exceptionally good at keeping them, and has developed a reputation for being inconsiderate in terms of the bigger picture. When confronted about it, she insists that something more important was afoot and personally makes the call to change plans at the last minute.
The damnedest thing about it is that L'ssa has terrific intuition most days and her solo operations have a surprising tendency to work despite a lack of planning. However, in teams it falls on everyone else to be as flexible and changing as she, or face the risk of a hulking bronze falling out of position to flame a particular piece of Thread. Teamwork is by far her weakest skill, and in formation drills her flying is clunky and bored, often full of mistakes from her not listening to the details of her instructions. Her stubbornness and her need to call the shots have left her with a number of enemies, notably those in the higher wings, but she is certain that someday they'll need her enough to get that promotion.
Given her run-in with bandits during her weyrlinghood, it's paramount to note that L'ssa is extremely pro-rider. Though she doesn't mean to be classist, she will always favor the rider in any confrontation, even if the rider in question doesn't suit her tastes. She subconsciously carries a grudging 'us versus them' mentality towards dragonless folk, and her attitude on them varies from 'useful tools' to 'watch for betrayal', but never will she outright ignore them. No, complacency is just what the bastards want, and in her younger years her fear of another ambush drove her to paranoia, sleepless nights, and eventually a dependency on alcohol to calm her nerves. She's since escaped these self-destructive years, but to this day the bronzerider's warm demeanor grows cold in the presence of too many 'potential suspects'.
Off the clock, L'ssa is a total crooner, and she'll sweet-talk the nearest thing to catch her attentions (which, like her priorities, change from Turn to Turn). However, despite being thoroughly pan-romantic, poly-amorous and ready to mingle, she has a difficult time cultivating relationships that feel too close or personal. In fact, when she realizes she actually likes someone, her first order of business is to actively shove them as far away as possible, glossing over their names and faces as if they'd never existed. Being that she craves company and is quick to fall for someone, this results in almost of her relationships acting like a teeter-totter of utter adoration to total apathy, often to the frustration of the object of her affections. There are, of course, a few people who have braved the teeter-totter long enough to have garnered her permanent loyalties, and most of those include her surviving clutchmates. L'ssa has no compunctions about throwing her life on the line for any of those people or their dragons, and garnering their favor is almost always a number one priority.
History:
Lissari was born in 166, the youngest in a line of boys to be birthed by a cattle rancher and her husband. Food was short, quarters were tight, and they grew even tighter two years later when she was given another brother, a sickly little thing named Mikkar. From the time she could walk she was handed a feeding bag, and the work never stopped from there; after all, there were lots of chores to be done before she was allowed to eat. Her childhood was a simple life, but one full of comradery and love for family. It was them n' the cows versus the rest of the world, and as far as Lissari knew, she liked it that way. However, in 176 the game became 'them n' the dead cows versus the plague and the thieves'. Most of their healthy cattle were butchered early on, and the ones they saved for reviving the flock were stolen under their nose. Lissari's family had to reach out to Nabol Hold, work odd jobs where they could to keep some amount of food on the table, but despite all their efforts, they lost both father and youngest son, the first to an injury in the caverns, the second to starvation itself.
Two turns later, Lissari stands for the Searchriders, not because she expects to be chosen (little farm girls didn't become dragonriders), but because there would be food in the holdhall proper. However, to her greatest surprise, the little bluerider sniffed her out, and with her father's approval and beaming pride she was ferried to High Reaches, where her training began. By all accounts, Lissari was a little terror. Being short for her age and nimble, the girl was constantly clambering for secret tunnels or hidden passageways, and she had more than her fair share of discipline for sneaking food from the kitchens for her own personal stash. Academics were an uphill struggle for her, as she'd never truly even learned to read, and she was prone to tantrums when she fell behind. It wasn't fair, she insisted, not when she could lift more than anyone her size, when she could climb higher! When she was assigned as squire to a young greenrider named L'ris, told she was to serve another and be beholden to her teachings, Lissari went into a rage. She'd only just left servitude, and now they wanted her to carry food and relay messages like a perfect little servant? She had none of that, and for the first couple of months Lissari did everything in her power to spite the greenrider's orders, refusing even the simplest of tasks except under risk of expulsion. However, once L'ris broke the shell of the little spitfire, Lissari was relatively easy to whip into shape, and by the time she was 14 and standing at hatchings she was a self-assured model of candidacy, able to read and write and swordfight with the rest of them.
It took three hatchings for the right dragon to find her, and when he did it was when she was stumbling in late, one sandal falling off and clutching to half of her breakfast. The first words to ever rumble through her mind were,steal that? Lissari, I will have you detained!> , after which he pounced on her as his eyes whirled rainbow. They were a devilish pair of weyrlings, and it was not uncommon to see the lumbering hulk of a hatchling stumble after her cackling form in the halls, obviously up to no good. When he wasn't in pursuit of his rider, Caldweth stuck out at his other weyrlings, ever vigilant for signs of criminality in his weyrling class. He would be the one to root out such evil, such corruption, and he would report it to the Weyrleader himself! But first, he needed to catch his rider before she snuck into the Weyrbowl after hours, what did she think she was doing?
Late in her weyrlinghood, Lissari and her class were on a routine training exercise outside the weyr, and she found it to be boring. They'd done the same drills dozens of times before, and she already knew most of them, so why did she have to get dragged out there? Convincing Caldweth that Ruathan raiders were somewhere nearby, she managed to get the uptight bronze to sneak out of a particularly dry part of the lecture, the two of them going on the hunt in the name of justice. For about half a candlemark, the two explored the surrounding region, sniffing out imaginary criminals that Caldweth believed to be real. However, never in a million lifetimes did Lissari expect to actually hear the clang of steel and sharp cries this far out in the wilderness, especially not from the direction of her class. Caldweth took to the skies and they rushed back to the site as soon as they could, but they arrived only in time to see several members of his class going Between, their riders bloody and broken on the ground. In a white hot rage, Lissari began to undo her rider's straps, intent on joining the fray herself, but Caldweth at least managed to stay calm, swooping down to grab a dragonless survivor and then betweening home. Just before they disappeared into the inky black, Lissari got her blade into one of the terrorists, but she was never given the satisfaction of knowing whether or not it struck true. When she returned to High Reaches, it was kicking and screaming and sobbing herself to exhaustion on the floor of the weyrbowl, Caldweth's solemn gaze watching over her as he began to relay the sequence of events to the weyr.
In 186, Lissari is one of the few remaining riders in her clutch to elide her name to L'ssa in what she considers to be the most somber graduation in High Reaches' history. Her bid for Second Wing is declined on account of her defiant behavior as a weyrling, and for similar reasons she is passed over by 3rd-1 and 2. L'ssa is welcomed into 4-1 with open arms, but she takes it more as an insult, sulking in her weyr for days at a time. When not brooding, the fledgling bronzerider experienced horrible flashbacks of the massacre, of the dead faces of her classmates, and it wasn't uncommon to hear screams in the night from her weyr. The first couple of times, the drudges come, but after a while even they get used to the sound of her grieving. L'ssa did not take well to following orders from her wingleader, except when L'ris was present, and even then she is marshaled once for talking back to authority. Eventually, L'ssa slips into drinking, which makes her a more compliant wingrider but comes with a host of other problems, namely her drunken escapades in the Lower Caverns. More than once, a friend or fellow wingrider was woken in the night by Caldweth's guilty call and recruited into dragging her back to bed, clothed or not.
In a streak of defiance against her 'oppressors', L'ssa urges Caldweth to join in a Gold's mating flight, as is his hideright. After consistent prodding, he rises and fails, though altogether not disappointed by his experience. For the sake of duty, he continues to fly whenever a gold rises, but over the turns his interest decreases until finally he declares that he has no need to mate, after which L'ssa stops pressuring him. In the meanwhile, she tries on a number of courtly pursuits herself in an attempt to drag herself out of her slump. In 188, after a series of dramatic experiences, L'ssa legitimately falls hard for a bluerider NPC, fawning over them like a lost dragonet. They stay happily weyrmated for a year, but issues involving L'ssa's flirtatious attitude and general wandering eye lead to a heated breakup late in the turn. Despondent, L'ssa returns to her drinking habits and her poor life choices, though with some help from Caldweth and several surprisingly interesting cases with her wing, she is back to relatively functioning. However, functioning was not the same as complacent. In 190, slighted by a cocky rider from the 1st wing, L'ssa challenges the man to a duel, leaving her with a pretty good scar on one cheek. Coincidentally, later on in the week the man finds wherry droppings in his bed, but L'ssa swears to this day that she knows nothing about it and has a fairly decent alibi. Nevertheless, it is the last straw for the administrative folks, and she is demoted to 5-1, much to her cursing.
Nothing in the world could have prepared L'ssa for the Dragonplague, not even the famines of her youth. Chaos broke out just as swiftly as disease, and wingriders dropped left and right, leaving many huddled in their weyrs, checking their dragons for pustules and seizures. Caldweth would not have it, though; when everything began to crumble, Caldweth took to the front lines, ferrying healers and medicine when he could and giving stern hopeful messages to others once the weyr was quarantined. He stood watch to keep out other dragonkin, and when the call came for healthy bronzes to accompany Hiraeth to deserted territory for one last clutch to save dragonkind, he was one of the first to volunteer. He and L'ssa spent months out in the deserts, holding security of the tiny oasis and occasionally sparring with candidates (and then the weyrlings). Being around the little ones was a nuisance on its best day (they always had so many questions), but L'ssa's spirits were eventually lifted once it looked like the class was healthy and ready to fly. Whether or not the two of them had contributed much personally, they had helped sustain High Reaches, and for once Caldweth's need for accomplishment was mollified.
When they returned with the weyrlings, L'ssa was greeted with an offer, a promotion to 3-1 and a more comfortable weyr for her service in defiance of the dragonplague (and mostly because they were in need of seasoned riders in the higher wings). Under the recently promoted O'ail, she began to actually take their position as wingriders seriously, and when she sent purses home to family in Nabol they found them to be the slightest bit heavier. L'ssa still had an eye for 2nd wing, but tended not to be as disrespectful to O'ail and finds herself well-received, especially by her old squiremaster. Caldweth in particular flourishes in the line of work, seeking out murderers in the name of justice, and overall the pair excels in what they do, even if they needed to be reigned in from time to time. In 196, L'ssa applied for Special Investigations at Caldweth's behest. Given her record, she is practically laughed out of the SI Office, much to the woman's chagrin. She's caught by one of her wingriders attempting to rig a trap filled with rotten tubers for the executive officer, and is talked down from actually exacting her revenge. However, she bribes a few drudges with a free dragon ride to ensure that the man receives nothing but stale klah for a week. Her jokes are all fun and games, she insists, but when her classmate El'zor is given the title of Wingleader herself she's reminded of her station, as well as her potential, and is inspired to start cleaning up her act.
At the start of the pass, L'ssa and Caldweth fight Thread for the first time, and given their mostly clean record from the past two Turns are given a little more leeway in the wing. During a routine fall, L'ssa falls out of formation to dive a clump of missed thread heading straight for a fourth wing-rider. She scorches it without a problem, but in her ascent back to her wing she and Caldweth get tangled in another rogue strand on his left flank. The damage is mostly cosmetic, but it nevertheless leaves them out of combat for a few weeks and earns L'ssa several stern talks about the value of teamwork.
With all the shuffling of authority following Hiraeth's latest flight, L'ssa stands to make her case for placement in the second wing, but for the first time she seems unmotivated to rise in the ranks. She fervently denies it, but anyone who is actually close to her realizes that she's deliberately keeping herself out of the politics to stay close to her squiremaster, at least until the greenrider retires.
Name: L'ssa (formerly Lissari)
Age: 35
Gender: Female
Rank: Wingrider (Wing 3-1, pending permission)
Appearance: L'ssa is a hard woman, built with strong shoulders and powerful arms. Standing at 5'6", she only towers over a select few, but nevertheless maintains a commanding presence with confident posture and a wry expression that is never up to any good. Her hair is shaved at the sides, but spills down from the top of her head in long black waves, held out of her face by a headband when necessary. Her skin is olive-toned, weathered, and well-scarred, with a distinctive burn scar on her right arm and shoulder from Threadfall. L'ssa's face is sharp and angular, with a downturned nose and lilted hazel eyes atop high cheekbones and a thin set of coyly curved lips. She carries herself like a predator in its home environment, and dresses to reinforce the image with a mixture of practically designed riding leathers with a splash of the exotic or exquisite, such as a vibrant hip-sash or a woven gold armband. With Gathers come the more extravagant clothing choices, but L'ssa is sure to always keep at least some functional riding gear incorporated into her outfit, no matter the occasion, and anything that absolutely can't be repurposed for flying is a no-go.
Personality: Look out kids, the biggest ego this side of High Reaches is prowling this way! L'ssa is a brash talker, a wave maker, and an all-out flirt, making her presence known since she first arrived as a candidate many turns ago. Her sense of humor is sophomoric, and it's never uncommon to hear the rough bark of her laughter echoing in the dining hall. Personal space is a thing that just doesn't exist for L'ssa, and she's quick to express her current mood with gestures or even touches (though over the years she's learned to respect distance for those who ask it). While being largely obtuse in personality, she is surprisingly non-violent, and is slow to turn to physical aggression in a confrontation. She'll certainly talk a big game, though, and isn't above resorting to taunts or jeers to try and force down the opposition with the sheer power of peer pressure. If all else fails, she will shrug someone off as simply not worth her time, and then its back to whatever joke she was telling the kitchen woman.
Her bravado isn't all talk, though: L'ssa is well known for putting in the extra little bit of effort where it counts, and when she's determined to a cause, she's even run herself to exhaustion a good number of times. Her focus is powerful, but on extreme blinders, and she tends to get so caught up on one task at a time that the others slack (but did you see how well oiled Caldweth's harness is?). Additionally, what she chooses to put her efforts towards is picked seemingly at random, and her priorities seem to have no real consistency from one turn to the next. While she's fantastic at making elaborate and stalwart promises, she's not exceptionally good at keeping them, and has developed a reputation for being inconsiderate in terms of the bigger picture. When confronted about it, she insists that something more important was afoot and personally makes the call to change plans at the last minute.
The damnedest thing about it is that L'ssa has terrific intuition most days and her solo operations have a surprising tendency to work despite a lack of planning. However, in teams it falls on everyone else to be as flexible and changing as she, or face the risk of a hulking bronze falling out of position to flame a particular piece of Thread. Teamwork is by far her weakest skill, and in formation drills her flying is clunky and bored, often full of mistakes from her not listening to the details of her instructions. Her stubbornness and her need to call the shots have left her with a number of enemies, notably those in the higher wings, but she is certain that someday they'll need her enough to get that promotion.
Given her run-in with bandits during her weyrlinghood, it's paramount to note that L'ssa is extremely pro-rider. Though she doesn't mean to be classist, she will always favor the rider in any confrontation, even if the rider in question doesn't suit her tastes. She subconsciously carries a grudging 'us versus them' mentality towards dragonless folk, and her attitude on them varies from 'useful tools' to 'watch for betrayal', but never will she outright ignore them. No, complacency is just what the bastards want, and in her younger years her fear of another ambush drove her to paranoia, sleepless nights, and eventually a dependency on alcohol to calm her nerves. She's since escaped these self-destructive years, but to this day the bronzerider's warm demeanor grows cold in the presence of too many 'potential suspects'.
Off the clock, L'ssa is a total crooner, and she'll sweet-talk the nearest thing to catch her attentions (which, like her priorities, change from Turn to Turn). However, despite being thoroughly pan-romantic, poly-amorous and ready to mingle, she has a difficult time cultivating relationships that feel too close or personal. In fact, when she realizes she actually likes someone, her first order of business is to actively shove them as far away as possible, glossing over their names and faces as if they'd never existed. Being that she craves company and is quick to fall for someone, this results in almost of her relationships acting like a teeter-totter of utter adoration to total apathy, often to the frustration of the object of her affections. There are, of course, a few people who have braved the teeter-totter long enough to have garnered her permanent loyalties, and most of those include her surviving clutchmates. L'ssa has no compunctions about throwing her life on the line for any of those people or their dragons, and garnering their favor is almost always a number one priority.
History:
Lissari was born in 166, the youngest in a line of boys to be birthed by a cattle rancher and her husband. Food was short, quarters were tight, and they grew even tighter two years later when she was given another brother, a sickly little thing named Mikkar. From the time she could walk she was handed a feeding bag, and the work never stopped from there; after all, there were lots of chores to be done before she was allowed to eat. Her childhood was a simple life, but one full of comradery and love for family. It was them n' the cows versus the rest of the world, and as far as Lissari knew, she liked it that way. However, in 176 the game became 'them n' the dead cows versus the plague and the thieves'. Most of their healthy cattle were butchered early on, and the ones they saved for reviving the flock were stolen under their nose. Lissari's family had to reach out to Nabol Hold, work odd jobs where they could to keep some amount of food on the table, but despite all their efforts, they lost both father and youngest son, the first to an injury in the caverns, the second to starvation itself.
Two turns later, Lissari stands for the Searchriders, not because she expects to be chosen (little farm girls didn't become dragonriders), but because there would be food in the holdhall proper. However, to her greatest surprise, the little bluerider sniffed her out, and with her father's approval and beaming pride she was ferried to High Reaches, where her training began. By all accounts, Lissari was a little terror. Being short for her age and nimble, the girl was constantly clambering for secret tunnels or hidden passageways, and she had more than her fair share of discipline for sneaking food from the kitchens for her own personal stash. Academics were an uphill struggle for her, as she'd never truly even learned to read, and she was prone to tantrums when she fell behind. It wasn't fair, she insisted, not when she could lift more than anyone her size, when she could climb higher! When she was assigned as squire to a young greenrider named L'ris, told she was to serve another and be beholden to her teachings, Lissari went into a rage. She'd only just left servitude, and now they wanted her to carry food and relay messages like a perfect little servant? She had none of that, and for the first couple of months Lissari did everything in her power to spite the greenrider's orders, refusing even the simplest of tasks except under risk of expulsion. However, once L'ris broke the shell of the little spitfire, Lissari was relatively easy to whip into shape, and by the time she was 14 and standing at hatchings she was a self-assured model of candidacy, able to read and write and swordfight with the rest of them.
It took three hatchings for the right dragon to find her, and when he did it was when she was stumbling in late, one sandal falling off and clutching to half of her breakfast. The first words to ever rumble through her mind were,
Late in her weyrlinghood, Lissari and her class were on a routine training exercise outside the weyr, and she found it to be boring. They'd done the same drills dozens of times before, and she already knew most of them, so why did she have to get dragged out there? Convincing Caldweth that Ruathan raiders were somewhere nearby, she managed to get the uptight bronze to sneak out of a particularly dry part of the lecture, the two of them going on the hunt in the name of justice. For about half a candlemark, the two explored the surrounding region, sniffing out imaginary criminals that Caldweth believed to be real. However, never in a million lifetimes did Lissari expect to actually hear the clang of steel and sharp cries this far out in the wilderness, especially not from the direction of her class. Caldweth took to the skies and they rushed back to the site as soon as they could, but they arrived only in time to see several members of his class going Between, their riders bloody and broken on the ground. In a white hot rage, Lissari began to undo her rider's straps, intent on joining the fray herself, but Caldweth at least managed to stay calm, swooping down to grab a dragonless survivor and then betweening home. Just before they disappeared into the inky black, Lissari got her blade into one of the terrorists, but she was never given the satisfaction of knowing whether or not it struck true. When she returned to High Reaches, it was kicking and screaming and sobbing herself to exhaustion on the floor of the weyrbowl, Caldweth's solemn gaze watching over her as he began to relay the sequence of events to the weyr.
In 186, Lissari is one of the few remaining riders in her clutch to elide her name to L'ssa in what she considers to be the most somber graduation in High Reaches' history. Her bid for Second Wing is declined on account of her defiant behavior as a weyrling, and for similar reasons she is passed over by 3rd-1 and 2. L'ssa is welcomed into 4-1 with open arms, but she takes it more as an insult, sulking in her weyr for days at a time. When not brooding, the fledgling bronzerider experienced horrible flashbacks of the massacre, of the dead faces of her classmates, and it wasn't uncommon to hear screams in the night from her weyr. The first couple of times, the drudges come, but after a while even they get used to the sound of her grieving. L'ssa did not take well to following orders from her wingleader, except when L'ris was present, and even then she is marshaled once for talking back to authority. Eventually, L'ssa slips into drinking, which makes her a more compliant wingrider but comes with a host of other problems, namely her drunken escapades in the Lower Caverns. More than once, a friend or fellow wingrider was woken in the night by Caldweth's guilty call and recruited into dragging her back to bed, clothed or not.
In a streak of defiance against her 'oppressors', L'ssa urges Caldweth to join in a Gold's mating flight, as is his hideright. After consistent prodding, he rises and fails, though altogether not disappointed by his experience. For the sake of duty, he continues to fly whenever a gold rises, but over the turns his interest decreases until finally he declares that he has no need to mate, after which L'ssa stops pressuring him. In the meanwhile, she tries on a number of courtly pursuits herself in an attempt to drag herself out of her slump. In 188, after a series of dramatic experiences, L'ssa legitimately falls hard for a bluerider NPC, fawning over them like a lost dragonet. They stay happily weyrmated for a year, but issues involving L'ssa's flirtatious attitude and general wandering eye lead to a heated breakup late in the turn. Despondent, L'ssa returns to her drinking habits and her poor life choices, though with some help from Caldweth and several surprisingly interesting cases with her wing, she is back to relatively functioning. However, functioning was not the same as complacent. In 190, slighted by a cocky rider from the 1st wing, L'ssa challenges the man to a duel, leaving her with a pretty good scar on one cheek. Coincidentally, later on in the week the man finds wherry droppings in his bed, but L'ssa swears to this day that she knows nothing about it and has a fairly decent alibi. Nevertheless, it is the last straw for the administrative folks, and she is demoted to 5-1, much to her cursing.
Nothing in the world could have prepared L'ssa for the Dragonplague, not even the famines of her youth. Chaos broke out just as swiftly as disease, and wingriders dropped left and right, leaving many huddled in their weyrs, checking their dragons for pustules and seizures. Caldweth would not have it, though; when everything began to crumble, Caldweth took to the front lines, ferrying healers and medicine when he could and giving stern hopeful messages to others once the weyr was quarantined. He stood watch to keep out other dragonkin, and when the call came for healthy bronzes to accompany Hiraeth to deserted territory for one last clutch to save dragonkind, he was one of the first to volunteer. He and L'ssa spent months out in the deserts, holding security of the tiny oasis and occasionally sparring with candidates (and then the weyrlings). Being around the little ones was a nuisance on its best day (they always had so many questions), but L'ssa's spirits were eventually lifted once it looked like the class was healthy and ready to fly. Whether or not the two of them had contributed much personally, they had helped sustain High Reaches, and for once Caldweth's need for accomplishment was mollified.
When they returned with the weyrlings, L'ssa was greeted with an offer, a promotion to 3-1 and a more comfortable weyr for her service in defiance of the dragonplague (and mostly because they were in need of seasoned riders in the higher wings). Under the recently promoted O'ail, she began to actually take their position as wingriders seriously, and when she sent purses home to family in Nabol they found them to be the slightest bit heavier. L'ssa still had an eye for 2nd wing, but tended not to be as disrespectful to O'ail and finds herself well-received, especially by her old squiremaster. Caldweth in particular flourishes in the line of work, seeking out murderers in the name of justice, and overall the pair excels in what they do, even if they needed to be reigned in from time to time. In 196, L'ssa applied for Special Investigations at Caldweth's behest. Given her record, she is practically laughed out of the SI Office, much to the woman's chagrin. She's caught by one of her wingriders attempting to rig a trap filled with rotten tubers for the executive officer, and is talked down from actually exacting her revenge. However, she bribes a few drudges with a free dragon ride to ensure that the man receives nothing but stale klah for a week. Her jokes are all fun and games, she insists, but when her classmate El'zor is given the title of Wingleader herself she's reminded of her station, as well as her potential, and is inspired to start cleaning up her act.
At the start of the pass, L'ssa and Caldweth fight Thread for the first time, and given their mostly clean record from the past two Turns are given a little more leeway in the wing. During a routine fall, L'ssa falls out of formation to dive a clump of missed thread heading straight for a fourth wing-rider. She scorches it without a problem, but in her ascent back to her wing she and Caldweth get tangled in another rogue strand on his left flank. The damage is mostly cosmetic, but it nevertheless leaves them out of combat for a few weeks and earns L'ssa several stern talks about the value of teamwork.
With all the shuffling of authority following Hiraeth's latest flight, L'ssa stands to make her case for placement in the second wing, but for the first time she seems unmotivated to rise in the ranks. She fervently denies it, but anyone who is actually close to her realizes that she's deliberately keeping herself out of the politics to stay close to her squiremaster, at least until the greenrider retires.
Name: Caldweth