Approved by Tawny

Name: Aeglentine (Egg)
Age: Seventeen
Gender: Female
Rank: Candidate
Appearance:

Egg looks like a bean pole, still in the stages of teenage gawkiness. She'll never be beautiful, but she has a little coltish charm - and knowing how to dress well helps. She has large dark eyes that are a little too big for her face (perhaps she'll grow into them, and perhaps she'll just continue to look a little too much like a slow loris), and a high hair-line that she can no longer conceal with carefully coiffured hair. Her hair - when it wasn't shaved down - is a dark brown, with a tendency to curl up at the ends.

It helps that she treats cosmetics as a sort of armour, and it's rare to find a day - even a day when she ends up trudging through the mud - when she hasn't got up half an hour early to ensure her face is in order.

Though for now she's dressed in candidate garb (and proud of it!), she has a few very fine dresses put away for... well, she's not sure what, but she's very carefully picked out the ones which would be appropriate to her station. The others she left for her sisters.

Personality:

Egg is, overall, a smart girl. This is concealed behind layers of frequent air-headed behaviour, an interest in the sort of feminine things that are frequently frowned on amongst riders, and a tendency to stare out of windows and day dream… but really, there is an intelligent mind somewhere at the bottom of it. She has a head for numbers and a surprisingly detailed knowledge of trade and trade-routes, and if pushed (as she has, until the last few turns, never really been) could be a substantial asset to the fifth wing.

She is romantic to the core, in every way that is implied by that - she truly believes in the goodness of riders and what they do, in the oath she intends to take, in love and kindness and that there is always a best option to take that will end up hurting no-one. Honour, duty, gallantry and virtue are all themes that resonate strongly with her, and she does seem to truly wish to embody them.

Egg is also, ultimately, a gentle person: though she works hard at the weapon skills that candidacy has attempted to instil in her, there is a hesitation and a lack of full commitment in each movement that betrays her. Though she understands absolutely that it is necessary, her life so far has not yet set her up to be able to truly commit. Egg is also rarely anything but polite: she has well-cultured manners, and a tendency to get passive-aggressive rather then actually aggressive. She has found that nothing annoys some people more then being overwhelmingly polite and positive towards them, and holds onto that.

She’s a determined young woman - she has an independent streak a mile wide, something encouraged by her uncle, and when she really gets her teeth stuck into an idea or a problem she will keep on struggling until she can find a path through. Despite this, she finds mundanity difficult to deal with - if something isn’t interesting, she’ll daydream right through it, and it’s not uncommon to find an abandoned chore half-way done while Egg stares out of a window.

She is also very sheltered in regards to the realities of life for those who have grown up less privileged then her. Aeglentine has never had to think about where her next meal might come from, or anything more serious then if she’s going to have a new dress to wear to the next Gather. She will find it difficult for a long time to understand what some people go through, and this may hamper her as a rider. It also means that there the lowered standards of candidate life have led to a little suffering on her side: she is doing her best not to whine.

She is very trusting, and easily tripped up by falsehoods - she simply doesn’t expect people to lie to her or take advantage, and it takes a lot to smash that trusting nature as regards any one person. Though this will probably change as she grows up, she will never be entirely free of it.

Egg subscribes to the philosophy of one of the more out-there groups of Sofianists, a belief she picked up from her mother and now clings to as part of her memory. She claims to be inspired by Sufia's example as a wise and gentle leader who promoted peace and charity, and keeps her mother's little "shrine" as a meditation aide. Should she be asked... or possibly even if she's not asked, it's for your own good, she's likely to pick out gemstones for people she thinks will bring them good luck or balance out their worse traits. Not everyone wants to know what she thinks about their worst traits.

History:

Aeglentine comes from a family of wealthy Kimmerian traders. The oldest of six daughters and two sons (her half-brothers), she was mostly brought up by a succession of nursemaids and tutors, though always directed by her ever-capable mother. The two of them were always close, and Egg draws the beginnings of her Sofianist beliefs from there: she still owns her mother’s tiny shrine with three figures of tiny gold dragons, intended as a mediation aid.

She was nine when her mother died in giving birth to her youngest daughter - something Egg has never entirely forgiven her distant and busy father for, feeling that if he had not been so set on acquiring a son her mother would have been there to see her children grow up. This feeling was compounded by the rapidity of her father’s remarriage as soon as custom permitted, to a young woman who rapidly produced a pair of twin boys.

The eleven turn old retreated deeper into a rich fantasy life, spending her hours entranced in whatever romances she could lay her hands on, whether from their own very small library or begged and borrowed from those of her peers. She was well-educated, well-turned out, and didn’t cause the trouble her sisters were beginning to - and was thus largely left to her own devices, easily slipping into the background.

She came back to her father’s attention when she turned fourteen, and began to be of an age to be interesting to him. He sent his dreamy daughter to stay with an uncle in High Reaches to learn part of their trade there - someone who she turned out to get along with exceptionally well. He and his wife had never had children, and the two of them treated her like their own daughter. The close attention was both a little discomforting and gratifying, and she blossomed under it, taking a great deal of interest in what she had been sent to learn.

Though she would never have thought of being a rider at Benden - on the contrary, Egg has unsurprisingly strong views on being treated like a brood mare - when presented at High Reaches during a Search, she grabbed at the opportunity she was given immediately, seeing in it something grand and romantic. After a brief firelizard conversation, her father gave his consent - it was one less daughter to find a dowry for that would attract a husband appropriate for her status, and to have a dragon-riding daughter was not such a bad thing.

Her romantic notions of dragonriding hit brutal reality in boot camp, and it's a wonder that Egg managed to get through it. The soft-handed young woman fell behind on almost everything that was demanded from her, and it was only sheer force of will that stopped her from dropping out - and the refusal to admit to her family that she might have gotten things wrong.