Post by InsaneWhitey28 on Feb 3, 2012 21:38:47 GMT -5
“Oh hello. I thought this was the smart persons club?”
.:Humans:.
name;;
Ka’aen (Kah-ayn)--Karaen (Kah-ra-en)
age;;
twenty-five
--Birth month- July
gender;;
male
sexual orientation;;
bisexual (prefers women)
rank;;
bluerider
physical appearance;;
Standing at 5’11”, Ka’aen is hardly a towering figure, or indeed very imposing. The bluerider’s figure tends to be more lanky than anything else, slender without defined muscles. He’s not weak—he does have some muscle—but only because he just barely manages to keep himself that fit. Thank Rhiiseth and a fast metabolism for that. Ka’aen’s only strength when it comes to physicality, if it can even be considered that, is that he’s fairly good at speed, but only for short distances, and fairly flexible. He knows the basics of fighting—had to—but it’s not something he’ll depend on if he has a say in it.
With skin that tans instead of burning, Ka’aen can be quite a range of colors. He becomes extraordinarily pale in the winter, tans deeply in the summers; it really just depends. The bluerider has no freckles, and it’s rare that he burns, short of spending a day out in the sun without protection. What’s nearly constant is the dark brown, shaggy hair that spills messily down the nape of his neck and across his face, dipping into his immediate eyesight, the longest of his bangs grazing a strong, sharp nose and the curve of his cheek. Dark stubble is often found along an angular jaw, tracing around full lips.
Ka’aen is quick to smile, usually a lopsided grin that shows his teeth and dimples one cheek but not the other. His smiles more often than not reach his eyes, too, which are set beneath dark eyebrows, a pale silver gray with flecks of a darker gray in it and hints of gray-blue. With his hair thrown in the mix, though, the way his smile flashes of canine teeth, Ka’aen is definitely scruffy—a kind of rough, unkempt appeal, at best; at worse, simply messy.
The bluerider’s clothing style is simple, but designed to be flattering. In the cooler North, he stayed with fitted leather jackets and tighter pants with his boots, but with the climate change, Ka’aen’s wardrobe has undergone a change of its own. Now he prefers cut-offs for pants, a belt clasped loosely around the waist, more a home to his favorite knife, ten inches in length with a fancy embossed hilt and a serrated double-edge, than to actually hold up the pants, which are tight enough to stay up on their own. His shirts tend towards plain white, and his feet are often bare.
personality;;
Lazy is probably the first word that comes to mind—and likely always will be. Ka’aen seems singularly unmotivated to exercise, or spar, or socialize, or move. Fortunately for Ka’aen, Rhiiseth is usually more than happy to poke him into motion, even if the blue’s hypocrisy keeps him from doing much more than giving pep talks. And while Ka’aen sometimes calls him out on it, most of the time he doesn’t bother, and it’s enough to keep the bluerider in relatively good shape, though he won’t be the strongest or the fastest or the best at anything, for when he does do anything, he does it with fierce one-mindedness.
As should be expected, Ka’aen rarely relies on physical strains to get him anywhere. Instead he prefers to watch his tongue and wiggle his way to the top—or as high to the top as he cares to be, because he’s not suicidal and he’s not interested in being Weyrleader or anything similar, because he’s also not dumb as a rock, thanks. The bluerider’s polite and he won’t hesitate to fawn if it gets him where he needs to be, demure around those who rank him. He has a very dry sense of humor that tends to come out prominently, though—but Ka’aen’s fairly good at making sure nobody takes anything he says personally if he doesn’t want them to.
Calm, laid-back, patient—Ka’aen doesn’t really seem like your stereotypical Northern rider at all, but for every virtue there is a shadow. He’s not stupid at all, and with calmness and patience come a steady, dangerous collected ferocity when need be. Ka’aen’s anger is never white-hot; it’s ice. Death doesn’t bother him; rape doesn’t bother him; Ka’aen may play courteous and charismatic and knight in shining armor, but the bluerider really doesn’t have morals. Let the world bleed and break around him—if he and Rhiiseth are untouched, that’s fine.
Once upon a time, Ka’aen was interrogator, and there lingers from that stretch of time a quiet confidence, a lack of fear when it comes to men larger and stronger than he. While he’s not a social person by any stretch of the imagination, Ka’aen does take care to build the relationships that will carry him through troubled times, keep them strong, and while any debts he owes will be dropped at a moment’s notice, he fully expects those owed to him will be paid in full.
history;;
Family
father;; Unknown| unknown, unknown |
mother;; Raeika of green Kaoulyhth|deceased|
once-lover;mother of Kaeir;; Ierana of green Ksyiehth |deceased|
son;; Kaier |benden, 8|
Born at Benden Weyr to a greenrider, of an unknown father, Karaen’s mother held him only long enough to bequeath upon him a stammered name before passing him off to the crèchewomen. Growing up, her name was not a familiar one in his mouth, and nor was that of her dragon, but he heard them from an early age, he’s Raeika’s son—the greenrider, you know, of Kaoulyhth? The words, the names, meant nothing to him, at first; but as he grew and comprehension dawned, his unknown mother’s name became part of his identity, the part he only said in his mind. I’m Karaen, and my mom’s a dragonrider.
However, the crèche was disorganized at best, chaotic at worst, and as soon as Karaen could walk and talk, the attention shifted away from him onto the younger children. And so it was that the older children began to notice him—a boy who thought too much and didn’t play the same games they did. Of course, they were only children, too, and the stumbling insults didn’t even hurt—much. But Karaen sensed the intent, and somewhere murkily in his mind, he understood why.
So he pretended. He adapted and pretended like their games interested him and told them what they wanted to hear, and that stuck in his mind. It worked. It wasn’t perfect and sometimes they still looked at him askew, like they were waiting for him to yawn or be different, but Karaen didn’t break, and after a while they stopped thinking of him as strange, and he became part of them.
Karaen was six when the war began. He would’ve have known about it if he had really, truly, become the same as the other children. But he hadn’t; he still though deeper than they did and their games still bored him—and he listened. Heard the unfairness of it all, the murmured distraught discussions when they didn’t think anyone was listening, Fort taking eggs from their Weyr, and he was both young and old enough to feel a surge of horrified hatred begin. You didn’t steal dragon eggs…
As soon as he was old enough to leave the crèche on forays of his own around the Weyr, he heard more of the war. And with any child’s insatiable curiosity, he wanted to know more. Karaen eavesdropped on conversations in the Main Hall and learned. Once he ducked into the Infirmary and saw a green dragon go between before his eyes, dead of the extensive wounds that ran down her throat and chest and ripped open her underbelly, leaving a woman with death in her eyes and a pool of ichor.
He left, and the next day he saw the body of the woman taken between by another dragon.
Later he learned through whispers no child was ever meant to hear that it was Raeika of green Kaoulyhth—the first and last time Karaen ever saw his mother.
By the time Karaen Turned twelve, he hated Fort fiercely—with a child’s unquestioning belief that his home, his Weyr, was right, could never be wrong. And it was easy to hate strangers without faces. He dreamed that they had red eyes and claws instead of fingernails and long teeth that click-clicked together and he couldn’t wait until they beat them, with a dragon of his own—he had to Impress, had to…and he did, a Turn after he began to Stand.
It was nearly the end of the Hatching when wings rose like a nebula around him, enveloping him, and a voice like smoke and ghosts hummed in his mind, vibrant and shifting, lilting like a song, Have you missed me, my only? Feel, we touch and does the world not exhale in relief, slow in its spinning for awe? Like music, For we are beautiful together, my soul…
The blue’s name was Rhiiseth, and he was perfect.
And distracting. For almost all of Weyrlinghood Ka’aen forgot he had to hate Fort, but with graduation, it returned with a shivering excitement. Now was it, when Fort was finally going to fall—but they didn’t, and Ka’aen, fourteen at the time, watched comrades fall around them, puppets with all of the strings cut, while Rhiiseth brought them out safely every time, with only minor injuries to speak of. And then the hatred was toned with injustice—why would they live while others were cut down—and, with time, maturity. It faded into a fierce determination, Ka’aen’s trust settling entirely on C’leon to pull them through the war.
Let the blood stain the seas with red; let the Riders fall—they would win, they must win, and the sacrifice would be worth the prize.
Benden was not a basically good place—but such a subtle change it had been, beginning from Ka’aen’s childhood and morphing from there on out, he had not noticed, and further, Ka’aen didn’t care. It was home, and that was really all there was to it. And it wasn’t like he knew any other way of life. He had never lived outside of Benden Weyr, never wanted to. How could he possibly leave his home, a home he had defended in his mind so long he couldn’t remember how to stop?
It didn’t matter that his own sexual preferences—for Ka’aen was attracted to men on occasion—were rapidly becoming one of the worst things to be. He didn’t see why but he accepted it, and began to adamantly claim heterosexuality, closing his eyes against what appeal he saw in his own gender. For better or for worse, though, as the war continued to drag on, Ka’aen started to falter—not in his loyalty to Benden, but to the exercise regimen that might have brought he and Rhiiseth to the front lines of the battle. The end of the war had become shades of gray in his mind, muddled, not the stark white it had once been.
When Thread fell again, Ka’aen was seventeen Turns old, and he was transferred to a Thread wing due to his youth. Now, without the violent opposition of other humans to urge him on, he and Rhiiseth fell into idleness. He trained enough to get by inspections, but he wasn’t good. Rhiiseth was, but Rhiiseth could hardly fight Thread by himself. Left with as much free time as he wanted and then some—training was much more loose for Thread wings than it had for fighting wings—Ka’aen settled into a comfortable anticipation, waiting for the day he and Rhiiseth would be placed back on a fighting wing, the day the war would finally end.
But it…didn’t come.
Still, life went on. Rhiiseth Chased and Caught several greens, and one of the greenriders bore a son of the Flight. The greenrider’s name was Ierana, and the child became Kaier. Ka’aen, discomfited by the idea of parenthood, visited briefly and infrequently, a distantly named father figure for the child. Over the course of his visits, though, he and Ierana became—if not friendly, at least comfortable with each other. She was young, too, Hold-bred and struggling to adjust to the Weyr, Threadfighting—and now, motherhood. For his part, Ka’aen wasn’t as harsh as most men were towards women—it was easier to be polite and smooth-tongued, keep people from hating him. It was safer.
It became a predictable pattern. Kaier rarely saw his father, spending more and more time in the crèche with children of his age and women more capable of motherhood, and whenever Ierana’s green, Ksyiehth, Rose, Rhiiseth almost invariably Caught her. Their relationship was never defined, never evolved past the occasional roll in the furs, and when Ierana became involved with a bluerider Ka’aen had gone through Weyrlinghood with, he let her go.
They were still friends, and somehow, Ka’aen was not surprised when she began to look worse and worse. Bruises began to appear on her wrists, and, as he found out when Rhiiseth continued to Catch Ksyiehth, appeared in dark splotches across her hips and thighs as well. Ka’aen didn’t interfere. It was Benden as he was accustomed to it; he knew not all men treated women with the careful courtesy he did, and that was okay with him: Each to his own.
After she and Ksyiehth were badly injured in a Threadfall, Ierana committed suicide—unheard of in Riders with their dragons still alive. And yet, it was somehow…not surprising to Ka’aen, who swallowed any grief he felt and moved on with life. His son became a distant ghost in the back of his mind—forgotten and unimportant. Rhiiseth, for his part, did not seem to miss Ksyiehth terribly. The blue didn’t try to remember her, and ultimately the name would elicit only a confused blink from the dragon—who?
Ka’aen had other friends, of course, but none of them were Ierana and his politeness, the smiles and little gestures of kindness, were always superficial from there on out.
He was nineteen when Kaegan defected from Benden, but by then it had become second nature to paste on a fake smile and tell himself it was fine—a minor setback in the grand scheme of things, was all. They’d get her back—or kill her—and things could proceed accordingly. How far could a goldrider hope to run—you couldn’t hide a gold dragon.
Things started to move faster after Ka’aen’s twentieth Turn, with the assassination of the Fort Weyrleaders. Around the same time, Ka’aen was chosen to interrogate the less important prisoners of war—the greenriders and blueriders, Wingriders who never really knew anything of importance. Ka’aen knew it was a fairly unnecessary task—Wingriders were always only told the bare minimum, weren’t they—but for thoroughness, he took care to do it properly, and he was good at it, better than he’d expected he’d be. Calm, patient enough to not push too hard, intelligent and careful enough not to kill before he had to.
Ka’aen didn’t enjoy it—would never really enjoy it—but he did accept it as doing his part, and that was fine. Pain and death didn’t bother him, could wash it off at the end of the day, clean his hands and have Rhiiseth entertain him with a story or by Chasing a green or flying a sweep. It was just life.
Ka’aen was twenty-two Turns old when the Siege of Selenitas turned everything upside down. He remained behind at Benden—why would the interrogator go to a Siege, after all, especially when he and Rhiiseth were not exceptional fighters? C’leon’s death and Fort’s takeover was not all part of the plan, and Ka’aen was stunned when the skeleton wings returned to Benden. He was not on the ‘kill’ list—and outwardly, he seemed to adapt well. He gave up the interrogator position, joining the fighting wings again, and calmly accepted the change in his home—and resented it.
Rhiiseth adapted better than he did, calmly and gracefully taking to the fighting again, but the blue offered no protest when Ka’aen decided they would leave Benden. To Wasteland they went, settling into the deserted Weyr, and if Ka’aen was viciously approving of the group turning to stealing from Benden, he hid it beneath the neutrality he was accustomed to—it was, after all, a necessity. It just felt better to think of it as sabotage, revenge. And while Wasteland was not—and would never be, he knew—Benden, and therefore home, it was a place he could live without feeling resent curl in his stomach like nausea. And there they could bide their time and wait.
The waiting finally ceased when it was their turn to lay waste to the final safehold of Pern, Selenitas. Granted, they didn’t do much. More of searched for Meira, didn’t get to her first, then kept other Selenitians from escaping out of a bolt hole(firescape), while Rhiiseth watched the carnage and gave Ka’aen updates in his own version of poetry Morse code on the battles. Ka’aen managed to shift out the message, most of the time.
Once the takeover of Selenitas was complete, the plans for the culling began for future mutations. The Desert Clutch did not disappoint. He didn’t participate; he was fine with the others taking the spotlight, wishing they would have simply gone about it in a better, more humane way. But beggers can’t be choosers.
Later, Rhiiseth won Feyrianth’s Flight, perfectly fine and dandy for Rhiiseth, who was obviously going to win from the beginning, but it was rather frustrating for Ka’aen. Blockaded out of Erilena’s weyr by the greenrider herself, and Serissa suddnely unattractive to his mind’s eye thanks to Rhiiseth being huffy over her blue being competition. Which was ridiculous and meant Ka’aen got stuck with a Flightmoth.
But perhaps, thinking back on it, the Flightmoth wasn’t so bad. Not compared to what happened at that dreadful Seltoberfest and the mistake he made in actually drinking far too much. Completely wasted and utterly cornered by Z’ves, he was coerced into bed with the man and as far as he remembered, barely gave his consent; dubious at best. Thankfully he couldn’t remember much of the incident and simply slapped on his smile the next time he saw the man.
Embarrassing incident or not, Z’ves death was still a blow to the pair. Well, more of a blow to Rhiiseth who found life utterly, and despicably boring without Lucith to bug. But that was the blue’s problem, and he would just have to get over it. The earthquake was a good distraction, the pair making it out of their weyr just before the ceiling came down thanks to betweening. Rhiiseth was quite smug with the fact he could between ground-to-air unlike some others. The two hovered in the air for a while, circling Selenitas as they watched it shake and tumble, knowing it was very unlikely they would get back inside to be able to help anyone, and they finally settled down in the ruined Weyrbowl once the shaking stopped.
When Burimyu came forward and offered assistance to Selenitas, they were all intensely grateful, and it seemed that at Burimyu, later renamed New Selenitas, Rhiiseth finally managed to regain some of his old charm, though he was entirely far more annoying to make up for Lucith’s absence. Hardly unsurprisingly, Rhiiseth won Storith’s Flight and thank Faranth Janisi didn’t lock the door like Erilena had, Ka’aen was actually able to get to the girl. Erilena was just… ridiculous.
With the new night menace roaming around the jungle, the pair are finding the tension heating in the night air, though that barely bothers them. What worries Ka’aen most, is Nitrath. Will there be more mutated hatchlings culled in her clutch?
---Only a sevenday or so before Nitrath's hatching was bound to happen, a salamandyr hatching was announced and Rhiiseth managed to coerce Ka'aen into going where he met Diamonique, who Rhiiseth calls Ka'aen's little diamond, and Impressed to the bronze Aodh. The woman intrigued him and it was no surprise that he was found sitting next to her during Nitrath's hatching.
Afterwords the bluerider not only found himself busy with entertaining her quirks, but battling against Fort in the coming Turn. With his hatred fully kindled, he was from hesitant to jump into the action. His skills were practiced once more as he was in the wings of Benden like old times, after the small scale battle with Fort he went off in the small groups to hunt down the renegades, snuffing out any group he found unless his wingleader accepted surrender.
After the small skirmish came the Summit, and Diamonique was to be sent back to Blossom Hold. More than a little sad over that loss, Rhiiseth not helping any, he decided to move to Blossom, it's not like he hasn't already changed homes multiple times. Having never lived in a Hold, it'll take this bluerider some time to adjust. Good thing Diamonique is around.
[x] By checking this box, I am saying that I have read the Rules and History, and will follow them.
