I don't know why nobody told you
How to unfold your love
I don't know how someone controlled you
They bought and sold you.
The Beatles, While My Guitar Gently Weeps | Regina Spektor Cover
BASICS
RETIRE INFO:
Ruunan: Retire, adopt if needed for IC reasons
NAME: Ruunan, sometimes Ruun (pronounced: rune)
GENDER: Male
PRONOUNS: He/him/his
ORIENTATION: Suppressed homoromantic, asexual at this stage (waiting for some emotional maturity to figure this out)
BIRTHDATE: Early Summer 2751
AGE: 16 as of Late Autumn 2767
LOCATION: High Reaches Weyr
OCCUPATION: Carpenter, candidate
WING: N/A
APPEARANCE
EYES: Chocolate brown
HAIR: Curly and brown
HEIGHT AND BUILD: Slender and lean, 5’6 (5’8 at full growth)
PLAY-BY: N/A
FULL APPEARANCE:
A curly crop of messy, dark brown hair gives Ruunan a boyish, innocent look. His eyes are a warm chestnut brown, and thick lashes cloak them in mystery. He has a rounded nose, and a rather long face with high cheekbones. His dimples are ever visible, his pleasant smile an almost-permanent feature of his demeanour. Despite a tendency to blush, very little colour shows through the olive tan of his skin. He has a soft, expressive face.
He is lean, and slightly below average in height. Muscle and fat seems to hide beneath slender limbs. His fast metabolism gives him an undernourished look despite a healthy appetite. Ruunan sickens easily with common ailments, prone to bad sniffles and occasional fevers in winter, but he is surprisingly sturdy. To date he has not broken any bones, despite his peculiar clumsiness. Small scars criss-cross nimble fingers, the results of his long Turns of woodwork and carpentry.
He dresses simply, never complaining of hand-me-downs or patchwork clothes. He has no preference for colour, either, but his grandmother tells him that earthy colours suit him more. He dresses slightly better for Gathers, but with little care for fashion his wardrobe seems a little lacklustre amongst the frippery of celebration. He keeps bits and bobs and things in his pockets- often things that he has made himself, like wooden buttons or dice. Being able to touch these things brings him a great sense of calm, and he is a bit of a fidgety hoarder.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
A softly-spoken, mild-mannered young man, Ruunan is content with the simple things in life. He daydreams a lot, often fantastical scenes in which he is more extroverted or confident. He is pleasant but may strike some as not quite wholly there, attention-wise. Easily distracted and sidetracked, Ruunan might even be described as slapdash and unfocused. He means well, but there are just so many more interesting things to think about… so his attention slips.
He is a sweet young man with a tenderness that does not discriminate. His lack of realism gives him the wonderful ability to ignore people’s flaws: criticism and malice do not affect him at all. He tunes out yelling, and makes a hasty departure from violent scenarios. Affable and kind-hearted, he is unphased by the general awfulness of humanity, content with his lot in life and thoroughly unconcerned with changing it.
Unambitious and often scatterbrained, it's a wonder that he achieves anything at all. Ruunan is actually quite proud of his carpentry skills, though he was never disciplined enough to pursue official apprenticeship with the Woodsmiths. His slow, methodical approach to life sees him making few mistakes, and he is a highly creative individual. He likes to express himself through his work, which is probably his only serious passion in life for the time being. He is possessive of his tools and final products, painfully uncomfortable if someone were to break something he had made.
He has very little in the way of temper, but tends to grow silent and cold when teased or bullied. He doesn't mind speaking with others, but his whimsical tendencies often result in him trailing off or losing the thread of the conversation. Intense discussions are difficult for him to process, so he grows quieter during debates or arguments. He dislikes difficulty in his life, and clings to a happy-go-lucky facade to avoid dealing with life’s complications.
Ruunan has not experienced all of the hormonal attraction that supposedly drives folks his age to pursue other folks around his age, but he is all too aware that his attention is drawn more to men than women. Love is a difficult, messy thing, so he does most of his observing from afar, quiet and content to enjoy what he sees. He does not dispute his own homosexuality, but Ruunan preys that nobody will notice at all because of his marked disinterest in romance altogether.
HISTORY
FAMILY:
- Maternal Grandmother: Runiyla {JM Weaver}
- Mother: Rakara {deceased}
- Father: Ishallan {deceased}
- Older siblings
- Mentor: Hevvik {JM Woodsmith}
BIRTHPLACE: Vandor Hold, small minor Hold in High Reaches territory
HISTORY:
TW: Death
In the warm, early summer days of 2751, Ruunan was born. He was the youngest sibling of his small but happy family. His grandmother assures him that his parents were fine people- his father had been a refiner, a Journeyman Miner, and his mother was an earnest and prolific farmer with a passion for plants. Their idyllic life came to an end when Vandor Hold was attacked by riders.
It was fortunate, perhaps, that Rakara had urged her mother Runiyla to take the children and flee a Turn before the fire-breathing devastation destroyed their Hold. Ishallan had been more sceptical and reticent to leave, and Rakara promised her mother that she would join them as soon as she felt it was safe to. In the meantime, grandmother and mother decided that the safest place to keep the children safe was within the nest of vipers itself: Golre surely wouldn’t set dragonriders on children within the Weyr. Runiyla was still a Journeyman Weaver despite her advancing age, and with her status was able to enter the Weyr with her grandchildren in tow. Ruunan was one at the time.
A Turn later, in 2753, Vandor Hold was destroyed. Runiyla later discovered both her daughter and son-in-law had died during the attack, along with Lord Ephec and his Lady Taery. Rumours had it that the refugees were fleeing southwards, but Runiyla believed in the plan: they were safest from dragonfire within the confines of the Weyr itself. If her grandchildren could somehow manage to be unremarkable enough not to draw attention to themselves, and smart enough to keep their heads down and work hard, they would survive the trauma and chaos of the Interval War.
So Ruunan grew up as a weyrbrat, beloved by his grandmother, admirative of his braver siblings, and trying not to make too much a nuisance of himself. Around the age of ten, he took interest in carpentry work and studied with a Woodsmith who had been stationed at the Weyr. The old man was kindly, but believed that Ruunan was not well-suited to the rigors of official apprenticeship, and encouraged him to pursue carpentry as his job rather than as a Craft. The boy was young and malleable: working with wood and building simple things suited him just fine, and it was much nicer to study with Hevvik than to go into the Crafthall and try to make things work there. This was easy, straight-forwards and perfectly understandable.
So he pursued carpentry, building up his furniture-making and tool-using skills until his growing creativity found outlets in simple embellishments. The lad was a decent hand at woodwork, Hevvik remarked, but the older Woodsmith was also glad that Ruunan hadn’t been thrust into a Craft too soon, where he might have struggled to keep up in a more demanding environment.
With Golre’s fall and High Reaches in serious need of rebuilding, Ruunan tried to help as best as he could. When he came of age, he elected to Stand as a candidate. He knew the situation was complicated, but he didn’t really understand all of the politics behind it. He knew his grandmother muttered about and cursed the ‘jumped up power-hungry mad riders’, but that could very well be her arthritis playing up in the cold. He knew his birth-Hold had been destroyed in the War, but so had many others. He felt oddly detached from everything around him, an attitude he still carries to this day. Between candidacy chores and his love for woodwork, Ruunan feels that his life is complete.