|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2014 9:26 pm
Approved by Tawny
THE CANDIDATE
Name: Kebarra
Age: 27
Gender: Male
Rank: Wher Apprentice/Squire
Appearance: Kebarra is average. Unremarkable. He fades into backgrounds. With lightish (though tanned and windburned) skin and hair that straddles the line between dirty blond and light brown, he could be from just about anywhere on the Northern Continent, though he’s pretty sure he comes from Bitra stock. He’s average height, at five foot ten, and stocky, with the solid musculature of someone who’s heavily active every single day (and the killer arms and back of someone who wields a longbow as his primary tool). He dresses plainly, preferring well-made, serviceable clothes that fit well without drawing attention to a body shape that is a little curvier, a little sleeker than he wants it to be. He favors dark colors and is never seen naked.
His face is…charming, if you’re being kind. It doesn’t have anything to do with his facial features, because frankly, they’re weird – a round, oddly-feminine jawline, sharp grey-green eyes, a brow that furrows readily with confusion or concern, and a nose that’s simply much too large for his face – but everything to do with his expressions. His emotions, on the whole, are big. He’s in possession of a crooked half-smile that somehow makes all the facial features fit together when he flashes it. When he’s happy, it lights up his face in a goofy grin. When he’s upset, his entire demeanor goes “kicked puppy.” He’s never handsome but maybe, to the right person, he can be cute.
Like most wher Candidates, he’s scarred up here and there – mostly marks on his arms, since he tends to go sleeveless except in the dead of winter, but there are also a handful of old cuts and scrapes over his torso. Most notably, there’s a curving line across one cheek where he caught a sliver from a bow that shattered in his hands, and the healed puncture scars of a wher bite on the meat of his right forearm.
Personality: In essence, Kebarra has two settings: On-Duty, and Off-Duty.
On-Duty Keb is focused, professional, and committed. He follows orders readily, but thinks for himself just as readily. The kind of man who works well alone or in a group, he makes every effort to integrate seamlessly, and is capable of putting aside personal differences (even if he might hate someone) for the sake of getting the job done. He likes work, likes having a goal - he despises feeling aimless - and in general wants to do things, and do them well. That said, he prefers distance. Keb doesn't particularly like being on the front lines, focusing better when he's far enough away that he can get a good look at the whole situation. He's a Big Picture thinker. Focused and analytical as he is, he doesn't like being unable to get a handle on the situation at large, and can easily be driven to distraction if he's forced to focus on small details for too long.
He's also not a good leader. Kebarra is independent. Sure, he'll be a good member of a team, and he'll follow any orders he's given, but Keb works best when given his instructions and left alone to complete them. In a combat situation, he's better-suited as a sniper or a scout - someone who still works with the unit but at a distance, where he can get a handle on the field as a whole and call shots or provide backup as necessary. He's an awful front lines fighter, and can't command other people to save his life. And though he buckles down and focuses with the best of them, Keb runs his mouth off. It's not usually loud, but he deals with stress by snarking. Witty comebacks, snappy one-liners, and quick backhanded compliments to his allies and enemies alike - the more intense the situation, the more likely Keb is to be continually snipping under his breath (and sometimes out loud). He claims it helps him focus.
Off-Duty Keb is more or less the polar opposite. He's still focused and driven, but all that energy and attention is expended primarily upon entertaining himself. In a very real sense, Keb has never exactly grown up. He's self-centered, extremely high-energy (to the point where he can't sit still for more than five minutes without fidgeting and goes stir-crazy if he’s inside for more than an hour), and easily-distracted by interesting things. He's also aggressively physical, and will gladly spar with any takers, or even wrestle with recruits half his age if the opportunity arises. As far as he's concerned, it's a great way for everyone to get their crazies out safely. (See? He's totally aware of his own behavior! Honest!) He has a wry sense of humor and an eye for the kind of pranks that start minor strife and upset without actually hurting anyone's feelings - and he'll admit, he gets a kick out of watching people bicker.
With other people, Keb is social but sometimes dismissive, and he frequently lacks the investment in friendships to sit and listen to people. That said, he's remarkably perceptive, and even if he might not have sat down to hear a friend talk about their problems, the odds are pretty good that he's kept an eye on them and at least has an idea of what's going on. He likes other people, and even if they might not consider him their friend, Keb probably already considers them his friend. It's not a particularly loaded term with him; "friend" is "anyone who doesn't try to cause me harm." "Allies" are much more important to him than friends; it takes a long time for Keb to build up enough trust to leave his safety in others’ hands. He doesn't easily put his faith in others - one of the reasons he prefers to keep an eye on everything - but once he's decided someone’s his ally or a partner, he is ferociously loyal to them.
Even off-duty, though, Kebarra still prefers distance. He often spends his free time holed up somewhere with a great vantage point and just watching people, but he's also perfectly capable of settling down with a group and actually having fun. He's a bit of a showoff, especially in front of girls, and is easily goaded into pissing contests. Those can get a little vindictive, too; a fast-track to major inconvenience for the rest of your life is to insult Kebarra's skill with a bow or his skill with the ladies. Yeah, he's petty - small items will go missing from the rooms of people he doesn't like, or someone might find sand in their shoes, maybe a tunnelsnake in their clothes-chest. It's immature, but it's also hilarious - at least, as far as Keb's concerned. He also eats like a starving dog, loves food, and has a pretty bad habit of stealing from the kitchens. It's not his fault food tastes better when it's stolen - and besides, it's fun to try and nick stuff without anyone noticing. Keeps his skills sharp!
He's not particularly good with women, primarily because he doesn't know how to turn off his "act like a teenager" tendencies for long enough for people to see past the obnoxious, but he does have a major soft spot for pretty girls. In private, he's remarkably affectionate, and a surprisingly thoughtful, attentive partner and friend. He keeps an eye out for the people he cares about. Long story short, he’s a dork. A dork with great aim and a knack for sass, but still primarily a dork.
History: Kebarra, for the most part, doesn't talk about his past. He was born to a butcher and his wife in a cothold outside Ruatha, the second of two children, care falling primarily into the care of his older brother, Barni, as soon as he was weaned, walking, and talking on his own. Kebarra's father...was not a good man. Keb doesn't talk about it, but not all of his scars are the result of his own clumsiness and bad judgment. Still, his mother did what she could to keep her boys safe, even when it frequently wasn't enough. Kebarra, often as not, felt alienated by his parents, sticking close to his brother instead. Three turns his senior, Barni was a protector, taking pains to keep Kebarra out of trouble as often as he could. They grew up poor and went hungry more often than not, even the family of a butcher only scraping by with a fraction better food than the other members of the impoverished cothold.
It was apparent to Kebarra from a young age that there was something wrong with him - something different in the way he saw himself. Little girls in Ruatha-governed territories were taught to be quite and polite, to speak when spoken to. Instead, Kebarra was almost identical to his brother: rough, intense, keyed-up and desperate for approval for doing the boy things that Barni did. It infuriated their father, but Barni was a lightning-rod for ire, and their mother supported her children for however they wanted to be, when their father wasn't around. It was implicit permission to shed skirts when Heybar was working. In their downtime, he and Barni escaped into the farmlands and forests outside their Hold. Barni taught him to fight and shoot, and Keb became a dab hand with a bow. By age thirteen he was accompanying Barni on hunting trips whenever they could find the chance to sneak away. The free time, the chance to just be himself was worth an occasional belting.
But Kebarra's father wasn't just cruel to his children and wife; his reputation as a cheater and a thief left a bad taste in the mouths of some of his drinking
and dragonpoker companions. And in a small cothold, a few days' distance outside the proper jurisdiction of Ruatha, matters were occasionally taken into their own hands. And when Heybar ran up too much of a tab with the wrong man, it was the last straw for some of the rougher gents. One afternoon after a successful early-morning hunt, thirteen-turn-old Kebarra and sixteen-turn-old Barni returned to find their home smoldering, both their parents lost to the flames and smoke.
The possibility that they risked the same fate as their parents if they stayed was too much - and beyond that, there would undoubtedly be dragonriders in the vicinity within the day. Unsure what else to do, the children gathered up their what few marks and belongings they could salvage and fled, rather than stick around and attempt to explain what had happened. They stopped to raid the butcher's shop on the way, but beyond that, fled Ruatha without a second glance. Eventually, footsore and still panicked, they made it to Fort Hold. From there, it was easy enough to find a little bit of work. Kebarra's knack with a bow and Barni's skill with knives earned them a place as working boys with a group of Harpers and Traders tracing the route from Fort to Southern Boll and its surrounding Holds.
For the most part, the work was easy, and the Traders a better family than their own had ever been. Kebarra's shooting caught the eye of the caravan's guards, who gladly took the child under their wing and taught him better and more accurate technique. Barni displayed a surprising head for numbers (penny-pinching Heybar might not have kept his children quite as ignorant as he wanted to) and the two of them integrated well for several turns.
Around age sixteen, though, Keb finally hit his breaking point. In the full throes of puberty, his outward gender presentation was becoming less and less "boyish," and more and more "tomboy just pretending." And the Trader caravan had made it clear that they saw him as a girl - a rough girl, but nonetheless, a girl that they thought might make a surprisingly capable wife for one of the boys of a similar age. Terrified and uncomfortable enough with his perceived gender that he couldn't bear the thought of being known as a girl any longer, he mustered the courage to come out to Barni. As close to Kebarra as he was, while Barni may not have understood what was going on in Keb's head, he was sympathetic. He accepted the pronoun switch without a second thought and agreed to help Keb nick clothes the next time they stopped at a Hold.
Of course, a quick stop to nick clothes seemed like a bit of a waste, and ever the opportunist, Barni decided to take his chance and engage in a little supplementary income. It went about as well as expected: Kebarra and Barni vanishing one night, a bit of a scuffle and a raised alarm sending in both of them cutting their losses and running in completely different directions, Kebarra showing up the next day dressed in neat new clothes, Barni nowhere to be found, and the family who had bedded down some of the caravan furious that the teenagers had stolen more than just clothes from them. Whatever else was missing (marks, mostly, and a good knife), Barni had hared off with it, leaving Keb with the clothes and the consequences to being exposed as a thief. In order to keep their own good graces with their patrons, the caravan had no choice but to run Kebarra out of the Hold, promising that they'd take care of Kebarra and make sure he was marked for good. It...didn't quite happen like that: the guards had become fond of Kebarra, and though they couldn't let him stay in the caravan, they allowed him to keep his bow, some marks, and the clothes on his back, and didn't mark him. With nothing else to his name and his brother still completely missing, Kebarra...made himself scarce.
He used the last of his money to bribe his way onto the first ship leaving Southern Boll, ending up homeless and penniless in Tillek.
Penniless he may have been, but without marketable skills, Kebarra was most emphatically not. Old enough to look like a young adult and good enough with a bow that he could demonstrate his skill to anyone who asked, he managed to find work both as an occasional addition to the local wherhandlers, and as a hunter. It was relatively easy work, and for the most part brought in enough money to clothe and feed himself, even if it meant he slept in barns, sheds, and the occasional unknowing innkeeper's attics for a few months. All told, Tillek wasn't actually a bad place to be homeless and trans. It was rough, of course, but at least Kebarra wasn't subject to the kind of violence he would otherwise have been. He took several months to adjust to his new gender presentation, and by the time he was seventeen, he was reliably presenting and perceived as a man by everyone he worked for.
High Reaches' Searchriders caught him by surprise, and Kebarra hadn't even intended to present himself; he had been on his way to a job when the brown lowered his head and asked if he wanted to attend the Weyr. Kebarra...well, he thought with his stomach rather than anything else, and agreed to it immediately. The Weyr was perhaps his one big break, and he was determined to take the opportunity for what it was.
High Reaches was just about as happy to have Kebarra as Kebarra was to be had; a Weyr ravaged by the dragonplague, riderpairs frantically trying to rebuild their forces for oncoming Thread - every set of hands was needed, and it helped that Kebarra had prior combat training. Boot camp was, for the most part, hard but not challenging work. Kebarra's strongest focus was on literacy and other general education; he'd gotten little of it in his prior life, and though he struggled quite a bit at learning to read and, for the most part, found it indescribably boring, he worked hard at it. This was perhaps the only chance he'd have to get his life on track, and he didn't want to blow it.
When his first turn at the Weyr had passed, he was actually requested by a Third Wing rider, and followed his squiremaster faithfully into the fray. For two turns, he was a studious, attentive, and extremely committed squire, proving himself a fairly reliable asset and developing a close relationship with his squiremaster, a fair chunk of Third-Two, and a small handful of Weyr civilians. Among the latter was Natalya, a former wherhandler and fellow Ruathan expatriate now living at High Reaches. Keb fell all over himself in an effort to impress her, though their relationship started primarily as occasional bickering during the now-and-again free time that he got as a squire. The work was hard, but he remembers the two turns fondly, as one of the happiest times in his life.
And then he turned twenty-one. It...was rough, for Kebarra, who had been pretty set on Impressing a dragon as a good way out and wasn't exactly looking forwrad to trying to figure out what to do with himself. Still, he wasn't ready to go back to Tillek just yet. He'd be able to find something to do with himself at the Weyr, right? There were plenty of aged-out Candidates hanging around. They must do...something. It struck him perhaps a week after his nameday: he had been at High Reaches for four turns. If he stuck around one more, he could become a wher apprentice. And Natalya had Impressed a gold wher, so he'd be able to get one as soon as Natask clutched, right? It would be easy!
Natalya, of course, was less-than-thrilled with the idea, expressly telling Kebarra not to become a wher candidate. He didn't listen, and as soon as he turned twenty-two, having officially been at the Weyr for five turns, he immediately enrolled as a wher apprentice. Natalya was furious, but Kebarra...didn't really care - at least not until Natask bit him in a brief, uncontrolled reflection of her handler's anger. It wasn't a severe bite, and it definitely wasn't enough to dissuade him from his decision, but he still has the scar.
It turned out, though, that wher apprentice training was...well, a lot like dragon Candidacy, only a lot more boring. Kebarra already knew a lot of what was going on, was in good physical health, and wasn't exactly thrilled to exchange his boring grey uniform for a boring green uniform. He had gotten...rather attached to the turn where he could wear whatever he wanted. Wher apprenticeship was just...not a challenge. And so Kebarra got bored. And then, destructive. And the destruction brought down the wrath of the Huntsman, which got him extra time in boot camp assigned, which made Keb more bored, which very nearly got him kicked out of Candidacy. And that was what it took for him to get his act together. All told, Kebarra ended up going through two turns of training before the Huntsman finally decided he had stopped being an idiot enough to work as a squire. And so he offered him up to anyone who would take him, fully expecting that no one would.
At that point, Natalya had decided she had no choice. She rolled her eyes and selected him as her squire because, as she told him, what else was she going to do with his idiot a** hanging around making messes? At least if he was her squire, she reasoned, she could force him to stay out of trouble. And Kebarra, who had a raging crush on the goldhandler, followed along happily. It was the perfect situation, even when Thread started to fall and Natalya started doing heavy work with Third Wing. He still had dead-on aim, and Natask was large enough to carry her diminutive handler and a squire riding tandem. Kebarra learned to ride and shoot - which was something that took a great deal of effort. He was actually quite proud of himself, and pretty happy with his lot in life. Eventually Natask would clutch, and he'd get an egg - right?
And then Natalya became Huntleader, and Kebarra's lackadaisical behavior suddenly became a lot less appealing. He reluctantly whipped himself into shape, sort of, and has been quietly following in Natalya's shadow ever since. He hopes to Impress sooner, rather than later, because it's very possible Natalya might throttle him otherwise.
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Tue Mar 18, 2014 3:49 pm
Hi! Just a quick point before we approve Kebarra! We’re a little unclear as to what exactly happened to Barni - where did he disappear to and why did he abandon his brother?
If you could clear that up, we’d be delighted to approve him, and are absolutely looking forward to seeing him played! <3
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Posted: Wed Mar 19, 2014 10:42 am
Aight, updated that paragraph a little bit. Keb doesn't know the reason behind Barni's cut-and-run, but essentially it was panic and self-preservation. I don't actually have plans for him to show up again, though.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Reply
