when you got skin in the game, you stay in the game
but you don't get a win unless you're playing the game
oh! you get love for it. you get hate for it
you get nothing if you wait for it
god help and forgive me
i wanna build something that's gonna outlive me
BASICS
RETIRE INFO: Adopt, together or separate
NAME: N'star (Nolastarre; sometimes Star)
GENDER: male
PRONOUNS: he/him/his
ORIENTATION: Biromantic Demisexual
BIRTHDATE: Spring 2724
AGE: forty-three Turns as of Fall 2767
LOCATION: Fort Weyr
OCCUPATION: dragonless, rider
WING: Daylight
APPEARANCE
EYES: golden brown
HAIR: dark brown, rumpled and soft to the touch
HEIGHT AND BUILD: five feet and nine inches; the sturdy build of someone who has worked hard their whole life
PLAY-BY: Robert Downey, Jr
FULL APPEARANCE:
Standing at five feet and nine inches, N'star is very solidly muscled. Unlike his holder or crafter counterpoints, very little of it has gone to seed. His age is evident in the streaks of silver in his brunet hair and neatly trimmed beard, though his only obvious wrinkles cluster around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. His good days, more abundant than bad days, the past few Turns - see him neatly dressed with clothes that are either new enough not to be patched, or patched so cleverly that the repair is invisible. He favors blues and browns, and tends towards cuts that make his legs look much longer than they are.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY: N'star is a man reinvented. He is a mess of contradictions and good intentions, an advocate of mind-healing. He is not free with personal information, but he can talk about dragons all the live long day. His favorite color of dragon is, oddly enough, blue.
One of the things that N'star carried over from his first time as a rider is his willingness to guest speak for the weyrling classes. He finds comfort in passing along the lessons he learned the hard way - sometimes fatally hard. He has become a vociferous pacifist in the time since he sobered up. War cost him his Carminath, his Ganla, and too many Turns of memory. Too many Turns of missed opportunity have made him want to change the world for the better.
On good days, he spends time with other people. He favors his clutchmates and those who Impressed after him more than riders whose dragons are older than Phoenth, but that is an unconscious bias. When many of them Impressed, he was in the worst place he's been. He doesn't like the memory.
But on bad days, the days when all he wants to do is crawl into a bottle, those are the days he needs something to do. His distractions vary - some days find him in the infirmary, doing the manual chores that require no great skill or training, just willingness. He spends time with the weyrfolk, and avoids butchery. That's not a place his head needs to go.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
Mother - Rhasta, Master Harper
Father - Nem, Journeyman Smith
several children
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: Ganla of green Bylanth deceased
BIRTHPLACE: Fort Weyr
HISTORY:
- Death
- Alcohol abuse
Nola grew up at Fort Weyr, where his mother had been posted at the time of his birth, as part of the crèche in the Lower Caverns. He wasn't properly weyrborn, but his mother was, and he was in many ways the typical weyrbrat. As such, he was presented to hatchings as soon as he turned fifteen.
Luck was with him, that first clutch. The first egg to hatch revealed a medium-toned brown, who made a bee-line towards scrawny little Nolastarre.
Nolastarre? No, goodness no. No, you are L'sta, and I am your Carminath!
L'sta and Carminath were trained at the beginning of the war. They fought, and were good at what they did. Disturbingly good, to the point where Rhasta cut off all contact with her son. But Carminath was fighting for his life, and L'sta's life, and that had to be protected at all costs. Battles in which he had to defend other people went less well.
A bare Turn before the war would end, Carminath's phenomenal luck ran out. So did L'sta's. A faulty strap left L'sta tumbling to the ground during an assault, resulting in a broken arm and many bruises. Carminath turned to retrieve his rider, and was taken by surprise. For one bad inspection, L'sta lost his dragon, his rank, and his purpose.
Nolastarre lost himself to alcohol. He descended into a bottle hours after Carminath fled between, and didn't emerge for several Turns. He would have been banished to a hold, in hopes that being away from dragons would improve his condition, but a trial run only made him worse. His once-weyrmate, Ganla of green Bylanth, devoted a lot of time and energy towards helping the dragonless man. They had two children together, and had been friends even without dragonlust influencing them.
Ganla and Bylanth were casualties of Golre's last attack on Fort, and it was feared that Nolastarre would never recover without her. But for all that he tried to drink himself to death, the former brownrider never asked for the fatal dose of fellis that so many begged for.
It was a miracle when he made a valiant attempt at sobriety in the months that followed. The struggle was difficult - many things sent him back into the bottle, from a dragon flying overhead to the sight of candidate knots - but for the first time in five Turns, Nolastarre was actively working towards rejoining society.
Being on the Sands was a complete accident. Nolastarre hadn't been near the Hatching Ground since one horrific incident, not long after losing Carminath - the closest he'd come to actually following his dragon. In truth, he hadn't meant to be on the actual Sands themselves. But when a butcher shoved a bucket of meat in his hands and told him to take it to Lexien, he decided that he could do that. Take the bucket to Lexien, and scurry away from the sands before the eggs started hatching. He couldn't handle a hatching, not yet.
But when he delivered the bucket and turned around, there was a little flame-licked green sitting in front of him.
Well, now! Don't you need some looking after? Bring that meat over here, I am most ravenous. N'star and Phoenth are going to go far, I can already tell.
And some people? For some people, that would have been the final nail in the coffin. Hearing another dragon in their head, where one used to live, would have spelled the end of everything. For N'star, it was a new chance at life. He and Phoenth were good for each other. She steadied him back into humanity, and he helped her learn her own greatness.
The recent upheaval has rocked N'star to his core. He swore off any and all mind altering substances - from the obvious things like wine and fellis to the more subtle klah - but getting through this time of change has tipped him closer to the bottle than he's been since before Phoenth hatched.
