BASICS
RETIRE INFO: Retire
NAME: Khinarae, 'Kina'
GENDER: female
PRONOUNS: she/her/hers
ORIENTATION: Biromantic Demipansexual
BIRTHDATE: Spring 2682
AGE: eighty-six Turns as of Midsummer 2768
LOCATION: Semaca Weyr
OCCUPATION: former Weyrlingmaster, Minuet wingrider, Master Harper, invalid consultant
WING: retired
APPEARANCE
EYES: dark brown, always full of mirth
HAIR: white, well kept and clean
HEIGHT AND BUILD: five feet and five inches, curvy and soft
PLAY-BY: Nichelle Nichols
FULL APPEARANCE:
Kina looks deceptively young for her age. She still moves freely, and rarely needs mobility aids. Her posture has always been very correct, and remains so as she works through her ninth decade. She dresses simply, but well, in clothes older than many of her students. Her dark skin bears only minimal scarring, but a myriad of wrinkles from a life well-spent.
In her youth, Khinarae wore scandalous dresses, and favored the color red. Nowadays, well, she still favors the color red, but her clothes are worn and faded. She wears many different shades of dull red and pink, and has settled into a very comfortable configuration of short dress over practical breeches.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
Khinarae is a perfect lady. She is polite and well-mannered, and never, ever forgets courtesy. She is soft-spoken and sweet, the very image of a lady, with a manner that makes even an insult seem like a compliment.
She is also more than willing to call out bad behavior, and even at her advanced age, she is more than willing to dole out physical punishment. She has ridden a dragon for longer than most of her peers have been alive. Although age has not always been kind to her, she is fit. Try to suggest that she is old and feeble, and see how quickly you are proven wrong.
Many people, when they get to be a certain age, desire familiarity. The comforts of home, all that jazz. Khinarae has spent her whole life going on one adventure after another. She is fierce in her determination, and sneaky in application. To ask her, it is entirely within possibility that she could influence the leaders of a weyr into a different course of action, all the while seeming like only a sounding board of ideas. According to her, of course.
HISTORY
FAMILY: Tangentially related to Ruatha Blood, but her direct connection is dead. She has several children, nieces, nephews, and grandchildren. It is possible that she and Fartoo share a grandchild.
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: none current
BIRTHPLACE: Ruatha Hold
HISTORY:
Khinarae was the third child of the Lord Holder's bastard son, in no danger of inheriting the Hold, but still part of the family - and subject to the same formality as the formal Blood. She was sponsored to the Harper Hall at ten, where she found an aptitude in both Voice and Harp. She was never formally tapped as either, but walked the tables at eighteen. She was posted to Fort Weyr a Turn later, to supplement their Weyrsinger.
Ralaarth had to come looking for her rider, who had not been formally Searched because of her craft. She found Kina in the Stands, talking to her grandparents.
Do not make me come up there, Khinarae. Your Ralaarth is small, but would cause a panic.
It took Kina most of a Turn to figure out that she had to focus on becoming a rider before she could continue her Harper studies. She graduated and became a full rider in Aurora Wing. As it was a time of peace, the Pass not scheduled to start for more than fifty Turns, she was permitted to continue her studies.
Khinarae was promoted to Master Harper in the Turn 2717, when she was thirty-five and Ralaarth had just turned fifteen. She was officially Fort Weyr's Weyrsinger, but she eventually became the assistant weyrlingmaster. Harpers are teachers, and she not only had a dragon, but a desire to mold the next generation.
Then Golre declared war on Pern, and Khinarae had to learn how to defend herself, her dragon, her weyr, and her charges. For more than twenty Turns, she and Ralaarth fought, dragon to dragon. It made her sick, and she fled Fort for more stable locales. Ista Weyr.
Ista was marginally safer than Fort, but no less affected by the strange mutations that began to crop up. Kina watched what was commonly called the 'first' mutation as he grew up without defect, and sired a clutch. He was the first of what turned out to be many.
Ralaarth never Rose in Flight, but that did not prevent Khinarae from forming attachments of her own. She never attached a fire lizard, although she has had a myriad of canines, felines, laprines, and - in her youth - more than a few attempts at keeping semurines as pets. Casual and serious liaisons alike produced a few children. At least one of her children Impressed dragonkin, and more than two of the subsequent grandchildren also Impressed. The oldest of her great-grandchildren is candidacy age.
Khinarae and Ralaarth survived the first war of the weyrs, and sometimes she wonders the cost. Kina watched the growing tensions between the weyrs again, and applied for a permanent transfer to Semaca. Master Harper Khinarae wishes to live out the rest of her life in the sun, not worrying about politics but training young dragons and their riders. That is her passion.
