Name: Petrion (PEH-tree-on)
Age: 13 (DOB 3561.02.27)
Sex: Male
Sexual Orientation: People.
Craft: Jr. Apprentice Healer
Rank: Weyrbrat
Location: High Reaches Weyr
Positive Trait List: Curious, assured, accepting, perceptive
Negative Trait List: Intrusive, self-serving, complacent, change-averse
Physical Description: His hair is dark and soft, curly as his mother’s, a shaggy knot around his ears, but dark, darker, nearly black save for the chocolatey brown revealed in full sun. Above wide, ever-grinning lips and a sharply pointed nose are eyes very much like his mother’s, mahogany red-flecked, deep brown and expressive. He is….a charming boy, perhaps, too young to be handsome; still small and not -quite- round, for life is too active for round, but soft with babyfat lingering over a frame that promises to one day be not exceptionally tall, but strong and sturdy. Petrion is not one to shy from a conversation and stands straight and sure behind his big eyes and barrage of questions. How can you say no to that face?
Personality: Petrion loves people. He loves knowing people, he wants to know all of the people, he’s going to learn something about you right now please and thank you. While not yet quite old enough comprehend that his pristine life has not been the life experienced by the majority of the Weyr’s inhabitants, Petrion has come to realize that every person he meets has something neat to share, something he doesn’t know yet. Socially fearless in the way of the truly assured, he is going to join you at your meal and pepper you with questions because that jacket is new and it looks sharp and by the way he’s Petrion—yeah, it’s a mouthful—and that jacket, you had a different one last week and--. Garrulous, friendly, slow to anger and slower to act on it, Petrion is a good child who likes to be good—or likes to be liked, and as yet is too young to understand that being liked can be useful. He welcomes individuals into his all-encompassing inner circle with only a single bright conversation and assumes that they have done the same for him.
This is a child who never outgrew his why phase. Petrion is curious past the point of caution, always watching—and always, eventually, intruding. What’s that you’re working on? What’s it for? Why’re you doing it? Why’re you doing it that way? Is there another way you could do it? What’ll you do after? And the next step? Why that? The boy has a filter, but it is a poor one; he thinks before speaking, weighs the consequences, and then almost always speaks anyway. The need to know is pressing. Perceptive, Petrion has a skill for picking his moments; his initially incessant questions calm to disciplined and patient prods interspersed with periods of wide-eyed observation once a companion begins answering in earnest. He does have a tendency to overstay his welcome, pushing too hard or getting too personal, but retreats only momentarily to raised hackles, backs slowly to warning barks, and departs only to outright commands.
Aiding this tendency is a sense of self-assuredness uncommon to one so young. Petrion has lived in the Weyr all of his short turns, and that consistency of environment has trained him “well”. Clever and socially-savvy, Petrion has as yet been presented with no lasting reason to doubt himself. As the son of a goldrider (which also, definitely, means the son of a bronzerider) and still safe from the critical eyes of the Weyr in his pre-Candidacy years, he is safely nestled in his personal identity as a Person Worth Knowing And Beloved By All. He is dutiful, not ambitious, and moves through the world with the comfort of one who knows exactly which his path is, how he is to follow it, and where it will bring him. Despite his curious nature, he is not a dreamer, but is firmly grounded in the here and now. Sure, it would be cool to see other parts of Pern—but High Reaches is his place, and High Reaches folk are his people, and Petrion’s whole world is people.
Young and unpolished, Petrion’s inquisitive nature often gets him into—well not trouble, but certainly under everyones’ skins. He is usually in the way, whether directly underfoot or shadowing from just far enough that one can’t really justify telling him to fly off. His initially-harmless questions frequently cross the line into intrusive, and avoiding or refusing to answer them tends to win the adverse a constant shadow until they relent. Though by no means spoiled, Petrion is proud, stubborn, and used to (eventually) getting his way. Exceptionally extroverted, he often fails to turn his questioning inward and is commonly guilty of hypocritical and self-serving behavior. He has a strong sense of permanence that can translate into neglecting important areas and people in his life. Having not yet faced either serious rejection or unpredictable change, it is safe to assume that he would handle both very poorly.
Ultimately, Petrion is a child. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and without bruise or blemish, he is a poem waiting to be written. While his nature is firm, his nurture has not yet come to pass, and he will undoubtedly learn and change and grow as he moves through his world. Perched precariously on the tipping points of puberty and Candidacy, his guiding mantras may be decided by the next few turns. We’ll see how he grows up.
History: Born to a Western goldrider less than a turn free of Weyrlinghood, Petrion was immediately dumped upon the creche—with the understanding that no, he was not being surrendered, but that his mother’s attention was for the time limited. Her gold was young and proud and not at all inclined to bow to the more democratic sentiments of the Weyr of her hatching, while her infant son was, well, eating and pooping and sleeping and repeating. The dragon needed her more. Through the early turns, Petrion’s mother Niobet maintained a presence in his life and kept a watchful eye as he aged into a precocious little nuisance. And when peaking tensions between their equitable community and her proud gold led to dragon and rider transferring from the Weyr, Niobet brought her toddling son with her.
The trio’s new home was as different from Western as steel from sand, and it was here that young Petrion came to understand the way the world worked. As the child of an ambitious gold dragon and her self-possessed rider, his status in the Weyr was never in question, and his position was one both of privilege and no little bit of expectation. He was a bright boy and his pedigree was perfect; he would Impress well and go on to do great deeds. And he knew what well meant, in the naïve way of children, and would debate it with his mother in the quiet hours when her bold dragon was asleep:
Aedeth was the best! Aedeth was always saying so, and surely his mother would agree? She was big and strong and brilliant and shiny and everyone looked up to her—and to the other golds, of course, who were also The Best. And the bronzes were almost, almost as big and strong as the golds, and they were the golds’ Very Best Friends, so the golds must know what they were doing when putting the bronzes in charge. Everyone else? Everyone else was….just trying to keep up, right? There was nothing bad about the other colors or wrong with them, and Petrion would never be mean to them because they weren’t golds or bronzes, but of course they couldn’t do the same sorts of things that golds and bronzes could! Different dragons, different colors, had different strengths. Then what made golds better? What made golds Best? That philosophical arc was well beyond him at the tender age of 8, “They’re big” being an unsatisfactory answer, and at 13 he still hasn’t quite wrapped his mind around it.
As a future pinnacle of weyr community, Petrion was encouraged in his education from a young age and learned his numbers and letters to the songs of the Weyrsinger, later proceeding to reading simple skins and performing basic arithmetic. With the return of Thread in his 11th turn and every hand needed, he began an apprenticeship under the weyr’s Healers. His early duties of cleaning bedpans and minding boiling pots of bandages have more recently expanded to monitoring the less critical patients and assisting with emergency first aid in the heat of a Fall, where, cool-headed and too young to truly have a sense of death, he hard balks to blood and ichor.
Petrion loves Healing—mostly for the patients, loves chatting with them while he works, loves all the good feelings that come from lifting their feelings—not only because they are happier, but because he figured out what to say to make them so. If the details of the medicines and salves and the appropriate order of procedures are less interesting, well, maybe that will come with age. As part of his duties, he continues to spend a decent bit of time with the weyr’s Harpers, learning the reading comprehension and mathematics skills that will enable him to study the great aged skins holding knowledge of Pern’s diseases and remedies, potions and draughts, and to thereby proceed into a true apprenticeship. He’s in a bit of a hurry, as he’ll explain when asked; he has to cram it all in before he Impresses, after all.
Other: Boy has some pipes, or at least some lungs. He can be loud.
Candidate Specific Questions
Do you want them to have an official Search RP? No, weyrbrat
Do you understand they will age every passing year regardless if you're there to RP the or not? Yes
Do you want them to have a possible Stands Impression? I mean he’s very small, but that could be fun. P’tre did, V’tre did, obvs it runs in the family
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